


I Need Company, I Need Human Heat

by Tam_Cranver



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Self-Esteem Issues, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:17:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5496764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tam_Cranver/pseuds/Tam_Cranver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Matt had a hard time talking to Foggy about his experiences with sex, and one time he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If we've both got the same diseases, it's irrelevant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [enthusiasmgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enthusiasmgirl/gifts).



> This story was written in response to the following prompt:
> 
> "So Foggy assumes that Matt has a burner phone for ladies and that he's always hooking up with beautiful women.
> 
> What if he is? What if Foggy is just speaking a truth and Matt Murdock is a sex addict. Foggy is frustrated by it but has learned to leave it alone. (He wanted a wingman but got a guy who cockblocks him every time even when multiple ladies are involved.) Matt hates it about himself but (like Daredevil) refuses to stop.
> 
> Maybe it's related to the heightened senses. Maybe it relates to childhood sexual abuse or his own abandonment issues that he needs sex to validate himself and feel close to people but doesn't want relationships. We can likely assume that with his heightened senses he was exposed to a lot of sounds of sex, or sensed that people were having sex, from a very young age and so he may have lost his virginity very early.
> 
> Ideas for how that could play out in a fic include:
> 
>  
> 
> Matt drinks for free at Josie's but Foggy doesn't because Matt once rocked her world.
> 
> Matt totally seeks out and hooks up with Vanessa after Fisk goes to jail, even though she's cries her way through it and clearly misses her fiancee. Or, if you want to make Vanessa particularly devious, Matt went back to talk to her again at the gallery intending to sleep with her and does.
> 
> Nelson and Murdock actually got a cheaper deal on their lease for the office because Matt slept with the rental agent following what we saw of their meeting
> 
> The reason Karen is so weird around Foggy at Mrs. Cardenas' and the reason she makes them the husband lasagna is because Matt already slept with her the night she stayed at his apartment (before she went to retrieve the files on Union Allied and had to be saved) and she has no clue where she stands with him but really likes him. Foggy either doesn't know or assumes it happened but knows that she has no shot with Matt and figures she'll eventually realize that and maybe he can ask her out when she's over Matt.
> 
>  
> 
> I just need a fic where Matt hooks up with women constantly and recklessly, often to his own disadvantage. "
> 
> In retrospect, I'm not sure I hit all the points here, but I did try to stick with the general idea of "constantly hooking up with people" and "self-destructive sexual behaviors." I hope it's still enjoyable!
> 
> I checked "underage" under the warnings because the first chapter contains a seventeen-year-old having sex with an eighteen-year-old, which may or may not count as underage depending on location; the age of consent is seventeen in New York, where this story takes place, but better safe than sorry.

In later years, when he and Foggy were both more than a little tipsy and Foggy would ask him how, in Foggy’s words, Matt had “punched his v-card,” Matt demurred, laughed, said, “A gentleman never tells!” It wasn’t necessarily that he thought Foggy would judge him, more that he didn’t know exactly how to tell it in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t sad, that Foggy didn’t need to feel sorry for him.

He never told the whole story.

The truth was, it was May of his junior year of high school and all his classmates were excited, because juniors, unlike sophomores, could go to the prom without being invited by a senior. Matt personally didn’t give a shit. What was the point? It was just a school dance; it wasn’t like he could go back and look at the pictures later, and from what he could understand, he’d probably be embarrassed if he could.

At St. Agnes, the only other kids around his age were Courtney Saviano, who was in and out of rehab and might or might not have been currently dating some sketchy twenty-five-year-old she’d kept sneaking out to see last year, and Josh McMillan, who had muscular dystrophy and probably wasn’t going to be doing a lot of dancing. Matt suspected that they were all going to be sitting around doing nothing on prom night. 

The air conditioner was broken again, and it was unseasonably warm for May. It made everything smell overripe and rotting, and the B.O. among the post-pubescent kids at the orphanage was unbearable. Matt had taken to studying in the basement, which was unfinished and full of gross old furniture the nuns hadn’t been able to find a place for anywhere else, but which was also cool and quiet and apparently creepy enough that most of the kids stayed away.

He sat on the rug and tapped on the smooth cement floor while the beat-up old tablet the nuns had bought him read Anna Karenina to him. It was a reading requirement for seniors, but Mrs. Callaghan, his English teacher, had suggested that he take the AP Literature and Composition test without even taking the class and grab a college credit with a more specialized class at CUNY. The paperwork and disability accommodations were probably going to be a pain in the ass, but anything that got him out of high school for a bit was worth the effort. Matt couldn’t wait to graduate, and he was willing to do whatever extra work it took to make sure he was going to a good school when he did. 

“Yo.”

Matt perked his head up and took his headphones off. Josh McMillan—but Matt hadn’t heard the elevator. Josh had had a rough few months, and was using his wheelchair most of the time now. “Josh?” he asked.

“Top of the stairs, bro,” said Josh. “Sister Elizabeth took most of the kids outside for a water balloon fight, so it’s actually kind of quiet for once up here. She wanted to know if you wanted to go out and throw balloons.”

Matt made a face at his tablet. Sister Elizabeth was nice, but she still hadn’t quite grasped the difference between “six years old” and “sixteen years old.” Probably because she herself was the kind of person who had clearly liked being a kid better than she liked being an adult, and was using her job in a children’s home like a second childhood of her own. “Tell her no thanks,” he yelled up the stairs.

“Already did,” said Josh. “She asked me, too. She’s fucking nuts, telling that gang of little shits to throw stuff at each other. It’s gonna be a fucking massacre.”

The profanity startled a laugh out of Matt. Sister Catherine, who was more or less in charge of the teenagers at St. Agnes, took a “wash your mouth out with soap” attitude toward cursing. Often literally. “Better watch it,” he said. “Sister Catherine’s gonna kill you.”

“Eh.” Josh didn’t sound too concerned about the prospect. “She’s outside with the water balloons, she’s not gonna hear. Come upstairs, I feel like an idiot shouting down at you.”

Matt might have pointed out that he hadn’t been the one to start this awkward conversation, or that he’d actually been busy, but though he wouldn’t have called him and Josh friends, they were at least allies against the pricks at school and the more oppressive nuns, so he closed his tablet case, grabbed his cane, and made his way upstairs. Josh waited patiently, and then started moving slowly and unevenly toward the first floor lounge. He didn’t bother to wait and see if Matt was following him. That was something Matt had always liked about Josh—he couldn’t possibly have cared less about Matt’s blindness. He had his own problems.

Josh grabbed the couch in the lounge, leaving Matt with the love seat, which still vaguely smelled of the cats who had torn it up before their owners had donated the chair to the church. The smell was irritating, but at least the chair was comfortable. Matt settled in and waited to see if Josh would talk. He didn’t usually seek Matt out, unless it was to ask him to listen for nuns while he and Courtney smoked weed outside. Now Josh’s eye was twitching worse than usual—Matt could hear the eyelashes fluttering—and his breath, shallow after his bout with pneumonia in February, was rapid. Clearly, he had something on his mind.

Sure enough, after a minute, Josh asked, “You going to prom?”

Matt shrugged. It was stiflingly warm in the room, and he could feel sweat running down his back with agonizing slowness. “No. I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

“Yeah. It’s all pretty lame.” Josh shifted in the couch. 

Matt let the silence stretch on for a long moment, feeling excruciatingly uncomfortable. Sister Anne was nice enough to cut the tags off his clothes for him, but he could feel the ragged edge of his tee-shirt’s tag against the back of his neck, where the frayed threads tickled and scratched at him. He couldn’t help but feel irritated that Josh had dragged him out of the basement to sit in silence after one short exchange of words. “So,” he said finally. “You going?”

“No. Figured I’d take a load off Sister Catherine’s mind and stick around here. Be a virtuous little Catholic boy like you.”

Josh had only been here a couple of years, so he’d missed the hospital visits and psychiatrist visits and visits from the police, looking for Stick. He’d missed the exorcisms. ‘Virtuous little Catholic boy.’ Josh didn’t know the half of it. “The prom’ll probably suck anyway,” Matt offered.

“Yeah. Father Malone sticking his ass between all the kids dancing, like ‘Leave room for Jesus!’”

“Censored versions of songs with all the cuss words beeped out.”

“Shitty crepe paper decorations.” Josh laughed, but it wasn’t happy. Matt managed a laugh, too, all the while trying to work out what Josh’s pounding heartbeat indicated. Stick’s training might have been helpful for identifying when someone was about to attack, but it wasn’t all that useful managing a high school social life. Matt was still working on figuring out how to match physiological reactions with particular emotions, with mixed results. 

Josh let out a sigh that sounded like air hissing from a soda bottle. “You and me are never gonna get laid, you know that, right?”

Matt blinked, nonplussed. “I’m sorry?”

“You heard me,” said Josh, almost aggressive now. “You and me, we’re not the kind of guys girls fuck. It’d be one thing to just be the weirdo living with nuns, or just be poor as shit, or just be a cripple, but all three? Better join the goddamned priesthood right now.”

“Good luck being a priest with a mouth like that,” shot Matt, stung. 

“The nuns are outside, suck-up. You don’t get extra points for being a priss when they’re not around.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get extra badass points for cussing every five seconds. And speak for yourself about not getting laid. You don’t know shit about me.”

“You ever do it?” asked Josh, suddenly eager, and then, all at once, he seemed to deflate, the bones in his spine creaking as he curled into himself. “Never mind. Whatever. I get it.”

Matt had been bluffing—he’d never been farther with a girl than holding hands—and he suddenly felt guilty, not so much about the deception, but about making Josh feel bad. “No,” he said, “I never did it.”

Josh sighed. “Me neither. I asked Bridget MacNamara to prom. You know her?”

Bridget, like Josh, was a senior, but Matt knew the name. She’d been in his organic chemistry class for a hot second before dropping it because of a conflict with fourth-year French. She always smelled like cheap body wash and chlorine; he’d never asked, but he thought she was probably on the swim team. “Sure,” he said. 

“You wouldn’t know, but she’s so fucking hot. Just, her body, like....” Josh did something with his hands, a kind of controlled flapping in arcs that sent stagnant air over Matt’s face. Tracing the outline of her body or something? 

“Okay,” said Matt. “So you asked her to prom.”

“Yeah. Figured since she didn’t have a boyfriend, I had as good a shot as anybody.” Josh made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Eh. She’s going with a group of friends, she said. They’re going out for dinner beforehand and getting a limo. She said I could come if I wanted. Jesus.”

“But you’re not going?” Matt asked, trying to clarify.

“Fuck, no. Even if I had the money, which I don’t, it was pretty fucking clear she didn’t actually want to go out with me. If I went, and she, like, even talked to me, it’d just be a pity thing. Fuck that.”

“Fuck that,” Matt echoed, feeling cold inside. He knew how that went. What it was like when people were nice to you because they were nice people and you were pitiful, not because they actually liked you. He sometimes thought he preferred it when people were assholes. At least then he could hate them without feeling bad about it. 

“It’s not even like I wanted to go to the stupid dance so much,” Josh went on. “I mean, it’s not like I can actually dance, you know. And it’s probably gonna be lame as fuck. I just thought, you know. I could be a regular guy, sort of?” He trailed off at the end, like he wasn’t sure that was what he had meant to say. “You know. Go out with a girl. Get dressed up. Maybe get to second base at the end of the night. But no. I’m too fucking...I don’t know. Guess I got a sign on my head that says ‘Feel sorry for this asshole.’”

“I know what you mean,” said Matt, thinking he probably did. “It’s like everybody’s always collecting charity for you. Ugh. I hate even asking anybody for help, I don’t want to remind them that I’m me.”

“Ugh, I know.” Josh sounded more animated now. “And like, Sister Catherine’s ‘sex is evil’ talks, where she pretty much says being disabled is a blessing because it helps keep us pure? Jesus, do I want to smack her.”

“God yes,” said Matt with feeling. He couldn’t help but respect Sister Catherine, who took after her namesake in not shrinking away from the grosser things that went along with being sick or disabled, but her attitudes about sex drove him nuts. “She doesn’t even give me the talks anymore. I think she’s literally forgotten that I have a dick.”

“That’s what you get for being a teacher’s pet.” Josh huffed out a loud breath—angry? Resigned? Matt tilted his head and listened to the air whistling in and out of Josh’s lungs, wondering where this was going. Though Matt didn’t make a habit of whining about his problems to other people, it had been kind of nice commiserating. 

“You ever think of—” Josh swallowed the end of the sentence, and Matt sat up straighter. Josh’s heart rate was rocketing, his body temperature rising.

“I ever think of what?”

“You ever think, like, we could help each other out?”

Matt frowned. “Help each other do what?” Find prom dates? Piss off Sister Catherine? 

“You know.” Josh did something with his hand, something that involved a fist moving up and down. “Like, uh. Help each other get off.”

Matt could honestly say that he had never thought that. That the idea had never occurred to him. “I’m not gay,” he said.

“Fuck you, neither am I,” said Josh hotly. “I just thought, you know, since nobody else is gonna sleep with us. But fine, you wanna die a virgin, have fun with your sainthood.”

“I’m not gonna die a virgin,” Matt snapped. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you times two.”

“I—I—fuck you in the _zoo_.”

That didn’t even make any sense.

It took about thirty seconds for them to realize that they’d been cussing each other out Doctor Seuss-style, and they both burst out in laughter at the same time. Matt felt his stomach cramping and his eyes watering up—it had been a long time since he’d really laughed.

“Shh, shh,” said Josh between gasps. “The nuns are gonna hear us.”

“Nah,” said Matt confidently. “They’re all outside.” A good half of them complaining about Sister Elizabeth’s foolishness in encouraging the water balloon fight, and the other half enthusiastically participating in it. Sister Mary Crispin was surprisingly spry for a 76-year-old.

“Yeah, you got those crazy ears,” Josh agreed. “You’d hear them coming, right?”

“I’d hear them coming.” 

The silence that followed was companionable, much more pleasant than the awkward tension of earlier, but also somehow full of significance in a way it hadn’t been before. It gave Matt time to think about what Josh had said. He didn’t _think_ that Josh had a crush on him or anything. If anything, he would have said that Josh had a crush on Courtney. And surely Josh couldn’t _really_ be so desperate about being a virgin as to hit up Matt. Matt didn’t actually think about sex all that often, dreams and stuff he overheard aside, but when he did, he always assumed that, when he got away from St. Agnes and Holy Cross High School and all the terrible people he went to school with, he’d find a girl who liked him for himself and whom he would like, too. They’d fall in love and then, when the time was right, they’d have sex.

When he really contemplated the matter, though, he didn’t really know why he thought that. Did he really think people would be that different in college? If Stick were to be believed, everybody was more or less the same, lived their lives according to the same basic lies, because they were too lazy and cowardly to see through them. And love, according to Stick, was the biggest lie of all. 

Matt swallowed. He hadn’t realized he’d had so much confidence in his future love life until that confidence was shaken. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe this really was their best shot. “So,” he found himself saying, “What exactly do you mean by ‘help each other out’?”

Josh, who’d sort of fallen over during their laughing fit, sat up again, propping himself on the arm of the couch so he could lean over toward Matt. “I don’t know. How do you usually do it when you get off?”

Lately, Sister Teresa Benedicta had been on a classical movie jag, so for the last month or so Matt had been getting off by imagining Marlene Dietrich or Ingrid Bergman saying things to him. He suspected that Josh would think this was lame, though, so he said, “I think about girls’ voices and just kind of...do it.”

“Nothing fancy, though, right?” asked Josh, sounding almost anxious. “You just jerk yourself off?”

“Mm-hmm,” agreed Matt, who wasn’t sure exactly what kind of “fancy” stuff Josh had in mind. “What do you do?”

“Same, I guess, only with Courtney’s People magazines.”

Matt had never read a People magazine, but he had a general impression that they were more gossip than porn. But, he supposed, it might have been a little awkward asking Courtney’s drug-dealer boyfriend for actual porn. “So....” he said, feeling like Sister Catherine was going to pop out of the ceiling at any moment and shame him for even _thinking_ about polluting his body this way, “did you, I mean. Did you want to try...doing something?”

“Didn’t ask you up here to invite you to the prom, bro.” Josh shifted on the couch, scooting away from Matt, and said, “Come over here, there’s more room.”

Matt stood up and took one step toward the couch before he stopped. He could hear Josh unzipping his fly. Was he seriously going to do this?

Josh hesitated. “Dude,” he said. “If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. I just thought it’d maybe be fun.”

It wasn’t his words but his tone that made Matt step closer. Josh sounded like Matt felt sometimes, when he’d wanted to try something new and realized that he couldn’t, that no matter what they said, the coach or the teacher or the other kids didn’t want him there, didn’t want to deal with the accommodations it would take for a blind kid to do ice skating or Mathletes or gymnastics. Matt didn’t blame them, really. He didn’t know how he’d feel in their shoes. But he did know that he wanted to be the kind of person who helped other people even when it was hard, and jerking off Josh McMillan on a couch wasn’t exactly a Herculean task.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Where is it?” He could have made a damned good educated guess as to where Josh’s dick was, but given the givens, it seemed like a good idea to ask. 

There was the shifting sound of fabric against fabric and skin—probably Josh sliding his pants down over his hips—and then Josh’s hand, callused and strong from pushing his wheelchair, wrapped around Matt’s and pulled it toward him. “Here,” he said, and there it was: smooth, curved, maybe a little bigger than Matt’s. Matt could feel the veins in it pumping blood rapidly as it jerked upward into his hand.

“Holy _shit_ ,” said Josh, sounding breathless, and Matt forced himself not to jerk his hand away too fast and hurt Josh.

“Good holy shit or bad?”

“Good,” Josh said. “So fucking good. I didn’t know it felt so different when it was someone else’s hand.”

Matt smiled—at least he wasn’t screwing up too badly yet—and moved his hand slowly up and down, curling his fingers loosely around Josh’s dick the way he would around his own. It was weird, doing it from this angle, but not difficult. And Josh _loved_ it.

“Oh, God, man, do—do that thing with your thumb again.”

“Oh—oh shit, your hands feel amazing.”

“ _Fuck_ , fuck fuck fuck, so good, so good.”

Even without the words, Matt could tell Josh felt good. His heart was racing, but not in a nervous or angry way—in a way that seemed to make his body thrum with pleasure. Matt could sense the heat rising from Josh’s skin, sense the tiny changes in temperature and pressure that was probably his arteries and veins expanding as he flushed. His—Jesus, those were Josh’s balls—were pulling upward, and Matt could smell sweat on the air, feel either sweat or...or something else making the movement of Matt’s hand smoother. It was so—so _vivid_ , so strong. Each part of it separately could have been gross, but together, it was kind of amazing. _He_ was doing this. _He_ was making Josh make those excited little pants, making his blood sing in his veins like this. 

Matt didn’t think he’d made another human being this happy since his dad died. Not that he wanted to think about his dad at a time like this.

Josh’s breath sped up, getting a little wheezy, and Matt could feel muscles contracting along the dick. He was close. Matt’s own dick was hard now, pushing uncomfortably against the inside of his jeans. As a general rule, Matt had excellent control over his own body, but he couldn’t muster up the concentration to make his erection go down. He was too focused on the warmth emanating from Josh, the catch in his breath as he said, “Matt—Matt!”

And then Josh was coming. It got all over Matt’s hand, spattered on his jeans, and he could smell it on Josh, too. It was disgusting. It was amazing. For what felt like an eternity, neither of them moved or said anything. Matt felt like he’d discovered some hitherto unknown mystery of the universe. This was probably what Stick had meant when he said sex made people stupid, but Matt didn’t care.

“Oh, _shit_ , dude,” said Josh finally, trying and failing to sit up. “I’m like a limp noodle over here. That was awesome. Step over, like, a foot to your right so I can do you.”

Even in the haze of his bliss, Matt felt a bit of hesitation. He knew from three years of sharing a bedroom with Josh that the guy’s fine motor control wasn’t, well. It wasn’t great. On the other hand, his erection was actually getting painful.

“I’m not gonna break it, man.” Josh’s voice was sharp, the post-orgasm afterglow already seeming to wear off, which struck Matt as unfair. That was a kind of moment that should have lasted forever.

“No, I know,” he said, making up his mind, and he pulled down his pants and stepped over to Josh.

Josh didn’t break it, and though it took him longer to get Matt off than it would have taken Matt to get himself off, there was still something wonderful about knowing that somebody else was touching him like this, gently, with the intention of making him happy, not out of pity or obligation but out of a kind of determination that Matt could relate to. 

Afterwards, Matt had to make his way over to the first-floor bathroom to wash his hands and grab the Febreze under the sink. He hated the smell of Febreze, but he couldn’t imagine that Sister Catherine wouldn’t notice that the lounge smelled like—well, like sex. Josh was still tired and floppy from his own orgasm, and they found reruns of M*A*S*H* on the TV and just chilled until the nuns and the rest of the kids came in from their water balloon fight.

It wasn’t a bad way to lose his virginity, all told. It made him and Josh friends in a way they hadn’t been before, even after Josh graduated, moved to a group home, started going out with a woman from one of his support groups, and stopped “helping out” Matt. It was a secret the two of them shared, the knowledge that even if nobody else saw it, their bodies weren’t useless, could do good things for other people. Sister Catherine’s attitudes on gay sex and premarital sex and disabled people having sex aside, Matt wasn’t ashamed of it. He knew that God would understand.

He still didn’t tell Foggy about it, though. He wasn’t sure what to say.


	2. I tremble because this fumble has become biblical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt's first relationship goes really well, until it doesn't. Maybe long-term relationships just aren't his thing.

Foggy’s first girlfriend had been, literally, his high school sweetheart; they’d started dating sophomore year, and broken up freshman year of college when it became obvious that the strain of distance was more than their relationship could bear. Her name was Tanya Hodgkins, and Foggy was still friends with her on Facebook, and had a lot of happy or funny stories from their relationship to share. 

Matt shared stories sometimes, too, but he had a hard time mustering up the fond detachment that Foggy seemed to feel when he talked about his exes.

His first girlfriend was named Naomi Franken, and she was wonderful, and it still hurt to think about her sometimes.

They’d met the first semester of their freshman year. College was strange for Matt. He’d always sort of thought that he’d make lots of friends in college, once he was around people who hadn’t known him during that rough period after his dad had died and before he got over wanting Stick to come back, but the truth was, he was at sea among the other freshman at Empire State. Most of them had parents who were bankers or lawyers or college professors; very few of them were first-generation college students, and Matt didn’t know _any_ of them who were both poor and disabled, or both poor and an orphan, or both an orphan and disabled, let alone all three. They talked about time they’d spent abroad, and complained about not having the latest model of phone, and didn’t seem to give a thought to how much it cost to eat at a restaurant every weekend, and Matt had absolutely no idea what to say to any of them. 

Naomi was different. Not—not in the basics, since her parents were still alive, and had plenty of money from being a dentist (mother) and an architect (father), and as far as Matt knew, she wasn’t disabled. But unlike most of his classmates, Naomi _knew_ that all that stuff made a difference. She thought about things. She was in Matt’s freshman sociology course, and in just about every class, she said something smart, insightful, compassionate—and in a class that had a cluster of aspiring frat guys who subscribed to the theory that people who couldn’t make it financially just weren’t trying hard enough, it meant a _lot_ to Matt to have an ally in the class who was willing to call them out on their shit. She wanted to be a social worker, and was genuinely interested in what Matt had to say about his own experiences. She didn’t tiptoe around him because he was blind, but asked a lot of smart questions about how he did his homework and what kind of accommodations helped him navigate New York and what would be helpful for her to do when they were together. She made pasta and canned soup in her dormitory lounge instead of going out on the weekends, and she always smelled like Campbell’s and like the organic soap she used, glycerin and plant oils and rose water. 

They had lunch together at least a few times a week—they had class together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it became a habit for them to go to her dorm lounge and make sandwiches afterward, but sometimes they met on Wednesdays, too, since Matt’s criminal justice class got out at the same time as Naomi’s biology class. Matt basked in the warmth that radiated from her as she sat across from him at the little table in the lounge, and cherished the moments when her curly hair, tied back in a ponytail, brushed against him, and when, one day in October, Naomi said, “Hey, Matt, would it be okay if I kissed you?” Matt smiled like he couldn’t remember ever smiling before and said, “I wish you would.” And she did, and it was hot and wet and tasted like spit and corned beef on rye, and absolutely perfect. 

And Matt, who had never been seriously interested in a girl before, fell head over heels in love.

They had sex for the first time about a month into the relationship. They’d been sitting in her dorm room, watching (or in Matt’s case, listening to) The Daily Show on Naomi’s laptop, when Naomi had asked, “So, this is super awkward, but have you ever, uh.”

“Ever what?” Matt had been slightly distracted by Lewis Black’s monologue, but Naomi’s heart rate was picking up, and he turned his attention back toward her.

“Ugh,” said Naomi, but it seemed aimed more at herself than at Matt. “Ever had sex with a girl. Sorry, I thought I’d be cooler talking about it.”

 _Ever had sex with a girl_ , she had specified. “No,” said Matt carefully. “Have you? With a guy, I mean. Or with a girl. I don’t judge.”

“Well. I did a couple of times, my senior year of high school. With my boyfriend at the time. It kind of sucked.”

The tightness in her voice told Matt that it had more than “kind of” sucked, and he felt a terrible anger rising in him, ready to tear anybody who had ever hurt her apart. “How come?” he asked.

She shrugged, knocking her shoulder against his. She did that all the time, touched him casually, like it had never occurred to her that he would break. He loved her for it. “It just. I don’t know, it was over really fast, and it hurt more than I was expecting. It wasn’t romantic or anything. Not that I’m a super romantic person or anything, but. I don’t know.”

“Well, we don’t have to...do anything, if you don’t want to. I like just doing what we’ve been doing fine.”

“That’s the thing, though.” She blew out an exasperated breath through her mouth, sending a stray curl of hair out of her eyes. “I really like the idea of it, you know? And I really like you. And I was thinking maybe—I mean, I don’t want to rush you or anything, this was just an idea—but maybe we could do stuff other than just, you know, straight-up...intercourse.”

Matt straightened up, no longer paying any attention to Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee chatting on the laptop. “What did you have in mind?”

“We could, um. I’ve never had someone eat me out, but my sister Esther says it’s kind of amazing. I’d do you if you do me.”

“Wow.” The idea was kind of stunning. As a general rule, Matt didn’t fantasize about oral sex. Hands were one thing, but the idea of other people’s...parts, or fluids, or whatever, in his mouth made him gag, and the thought of trusting his _own_ parts to someone else’s mouth, a mouth presumably equipped with teeth and filled with particles of chewed food and germs of all sorts, was genuinely horrifying. He and Josh had never even discussed doing things with their mouths.

But Naomi was different. Things that were gross with other people were wonderful with her—Matt even liked her B.O., and the way her shoes smelled, and the way she sniffled after she sneezed. Kissing Naomi was like...like they were having a conversation without words, like they were learning stuff about each other based on closeness and taste and how Naomi’s cheek felt under his hand. Things that Matt wouldn’t even dream of doing with other people might actually be nice with Naomi. But could he make it nice for her? He didn’t want to be like her high school boyfriend, fast and painful and not at all romantic. He wanted to make her happy. 

“We don’t have to,” she said, and Matt realized that he’d been quiet for a long time. “It was just an idea.”

“No,” said Matt. “I mean, I’d like to. I just, I don’t know how good I’ll be. I mean, growing up with a bunch of nuns, I don’t have a clear idea of what exactly you _do_ during oral sex.”

“I’ve never done it either,” said Naomi, and Matt could hear the smile in her voice. “I mean, I’ve given a blowjob before, a couple of times, but I’ve never done it the other way. We can figure it out together.”

Matt liked the sound of that. “Is your roommate going to be gone for a while?”

“Her mom’s taking her to a hotel tonight and tomorrow for a ‘girls’ weekend.’” Naomi reached up to take off Matt’s sunglasses and stroked the side of his face. It sent a shiver up his spine and a jolt of sensation to his dick. “Plenty of time.”

They tried cunnilingus first, since they were both new at it, and Matt liked to think of himself as at least somewhat gentlemanly. They threw their clothes in the hamper—one more thing to love about Naomi was that she was good about keeping the floors in her room clear for Matt—and settled awkwardly on Naomi’s bed.

“Do you want me to, you know....” Naomi grasped Matt’s hand and began directing it toward her crotch. “Help you find it?”

“I think I can probably figure it out,” Matt started, but then his hand was on her...well, the sex education at Catholic school hadn’t been great, so he didn’t know what this part of her body was called, but he’d never felt anything like it before. The hair here was thick, wiry, and curly, and as he moved his fingers down, everything started to part, with a warm crevice in between. “On the other hand,” he said, “a little help never hurt anybody.”

Naomi laughed and guided his hand to her clitoris, which was a strange little bump surrounded by wrinkled skin, and then to the opening itself, with its smooth, slick walls and tight, wrinkled mouth. 

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Matt.

“Likewise,” said Naomi, her voice going a little pinched. There was—there was blood flowing quickly to her breasts, he could hear tiny contractions in the skin as her nipples hardened. “So what do you think? You want to try it with your mouth?”

Matt swallowed. “Definitely.”

Downstairs, Naomi tasted salty, with a thicker consistency than sweat and a stronger flavor behind it that Matt couldn’t identify. It didn’t feel like regular skin, where he was licking, and he ran an exploratory tongue up and down the length of the crevice between her legs. 

“Holy shit,” Naomi gasped. “That’s amazing. Try the clit?”

Bringing his tongue up to the place he’d felt the clitoris earlier, he licked it.

“Harder! Matt—”

He licked harder, and then tried to run his tongue in a circle around it. He didn’t know how he was doing technique-wise, but Naomi liked it, the familiar heat rising from her body and her heartbeat rapidly thrumming. 

“Could—could you kind of—kind of stick it in? Your tongue, I mean?”

Matt was happy to oblige. This was the strangest, most wonderful sensation in the world. He was _buried_ in her down here, her smell overwhelming him with every breath, the air in his mouth tasting only of her. The heat was unbelievable, the increasing slickness sending unfamiliar but exciting signals to Matt’s dick. He could feel her hands in his hair, sometimes tugging, sometimes tangling her fingers in it, sometimes just laying them flat, and having her on both sides of his head made him feel surrounded in a comforting way, as if she were embracing him.

He didn’t know how long they stayed like that, Naomi lying flat on the bed, Matt half kneeling, half crouching between her legs. He didn’t care. He would have stayed there forever, in this perfect, endless moment. He wanted to spend every second of the rest of his life making her happy like this.

At some point, he heard muscles contracting, felt them tense through Naomi’s vagina, and she said, “Oh—Matt—I’m—Oh!” All of Matt’s world contracted into one point, and he felt like his heart would beat right out of his chest. And then she made a noise that was like a gasp and a breathless shriek, and more of that curious thick slick substance came out in a gush, and Matt licked at it like he could clean her with his mouth. He couldn’t imagine doing this with Josh, but it seemed perfectly natural, right even, to do it with Naomi.

She pulled at his hair. “Matt—no, it’s, it’s too much.”

The bottom plummeted out of Matt’s world, and a cold fear stabbed him in the heart, but before he could apologize, she was sliding to the edge of the bed and pulling him into a kiss. “That was amazing,” she murmured into his cheek as she pulled away. “The most amazing thing in the world. Thank you.”

Matt rediscovered a little of his equilibrium, and he managed to say, “Not bad for a first time?”

“No.” She buried her face in his neck. “Amazing.” They sat like that for a while, Matt listening as their pulses slowed, and then Naomi said, “Want me to return the favor?”

It was at that moment that Matt realized that he had come on Naomi’s floor. It smelled, and it was warmer than the floor and stood out like a sore thumb in his general sense of the room’s temperature. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Um. Not necessary.” _The mind controls the body, my ass!_

“Matt,” said Naomi, something like awe in her voice, “did you come from eating me out?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder again. “I love you.”

 _I love you._ Matt was living out the most wonderful dream, one he never wanted to wake up from. “I love you, too,” he murmured into her hair.

They did it a lot after that, and eventually Naomi did get around to giving Matt a blowjob—which was amazing—and after they got a pack of condoms from Student Health and Matt got some practice putting them on, they tried full-on sex, which was also amazing. And then, because the lady at Student Health had given them a lecture about it, they tried cunnilingus and fellatio with dental dams and condoms, which was weird and (in the case of the dental dams) left a plasticky aftertaste in Matt’s mouth, but was also its own kind of amazing. 

Matt knew it was stupid to think in terms of forever, that most of the time someone’s first serious relationship didn’t last, but he couldn’t help but think that he and Naomi were going to go the distance. Sure, he wasn’t going to be bringing much into the marriage in terms of assets or familial support, but at least Naomi would never have to deal with a nagging mother-in-law. She was Jewish and he was Catholic, but whatever, she could convert, or he could convert, or they could get a license at City Hall and raise their kids Unitarian Universalist. Or not—they didn’t have to have kids, if Naomi didn’t want them, it could just be the two of them, and that would be perfect, too. 

All Matt’s long-term dreams aside, he hadn’t actually planned on inviting himself along to Naomi’s parents’ for Thanksgiving. For starters, they lived outside of Chicago, which was a hell of a trip, farther away from New York City than Matt had ever been. Even if they’d lived in Manhattan, though, the last thing on earth that Matt wanted either Naomi or her parents to think was that Matt was a moocher, or some poor little waif who didn’t have anywhere to go over the holidays. The dorms at ESU closed, but the emergency short-term housing rooms at St. Agnes were open, and Sister Mary Crispin had told Matt that he was free to spend his vacations there as long as he was a full-time student.

And Matt was perfectly okay with that, but when the subject of holidays had come up and he’d told Naomi about his plans, she’d said, “You know, the nuns sound really nice and everything, but if you wanted, you could come home with me over the break.”

Matt winced. “That’s okay, I wouldn’t want to impose.”

Naomi touched his hand, a silent request for permission, and when he nodded, she reached up her hand to Matt’s cheek, gently brushing a thumb over the stubble on his jaw. “You wouldn’t be,” she said. “You’re my boyfriend—my parents would have to meet you sooner or later.”

That...was an aspect of dating Naomi that Matt hadn’t thought about as much as he now realized he ought to have. “I, uh. I don’t know. It seems like kind of short notice to invite myself over.”

“You wouldn’t be,” said Naomi, moving her hand down to Matt’s thigh. “I’d be inviting you over. And my mom is great at finding cheap flights at short notice, in case you were worried about that.”

Her voice was so great—low and warm and smooth. Matt could have listened to it all day. “You don’t think your parents would mind?” he asked, his resolve weakening.

“I think they’d be thrilled,” Naomi said. “You’re smart, dedicated, and want to make the world a better place—they’ll probably like you better than me. And plus, you and I get along really well. That already gives you a head start on Dale with my parents. Dale was my boyfriend in high school,” she explained.

“You didn’t get along with Dale?” asked Matt, though he wasn’t surprised. From what hints Naomi had let slip, Dale sounded like a douche.

“Not near the end we didn’t,” said Naomi. “We fought all the time. He said some really shitty things to me in front of my parents, and I think my dad wanted to kill him.” Matt gulped involuntarily, and she patted his thigh reassuringly. “Like I said, though, they’re gonna love you. Just be yourself. I really want them to get to know you the way I do.”

Well, Matt could hardly say no to that. And when Naomi told him two days later that she’d talked to her parents about bringing Matt with her over Thanksgiving, and they’d been totally okay with it, he couldn’t detect even a hint of insincerity in her voice. He had the sense of being on a train going at breakneck speed to someplace unknown but potentially wonderful—everything with Naomi was going so well, and so fast, he could hardly catch his breath.

He loved it.

That wasn’t to say that there weren’t obstacles along the way. He was stunned when Naomi told him how much a plane ticket from JFK to O’Hare cost, and she’d been sheepish when he reminded her that he didn’t have a credit card. She’d offered to pay for it herself, but that idea horrified Matt, and he broke into the student loan money he was saving until next semester to pay her back in cash. 

Once the plane tickets were dealt with, there was the airport, which Matt was convinced was some previously unheard-of circle of hell. The roaring of engines—the smells of masses of people, sweating in their too-warm coats as they lugged around their suitcases—the sounds of multiple announcements blaring simultaneously over the PA system—Matt’s senses weren’t going to help him find his way around the airport _at all_. The opposite, in fact. And the plane was even worse. Naomi was sympathetic and understanding when Matt freaked out at the pressure change as the plane took off, and when he found himself hurling into a bag provided by the patient flight attendant, but the sense that Matt was making a nuisance of himself filled his stomach with roiling nerves and overpowered any feelings of excitement he might have been entertaining. 

But when Naomi’s parents came to pick them up at the airport, Matt let himself think that things would be okay.

“Mom, Dad,” said Naomi, “this is Matt, my boyfriend.” And she sounded...kind of proud about it. Matt stood up straighter and tried to be worthy of it.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Franken. Dr. Franken.” He held out a hand, hoping one of them would take it.

“Oh, please, Matt. Call me Daniel,” said Mr. Franken, taking Matt’s hand. “It’s great to meet you. Gail and I have heard so much about you.”

Matt smiled and said, “Mostly good, I hope,” because that was what people said in this kind of situation, wasn’t it?

Dr. Franken laughed and took his hand when Mr. Franken let go of it. “Of course mostly good,” she said. “Should we head down to the baggage claim?”

Matt hadn’t checked any bags—what on earth would be the point in paying twenty-five bucks for a five-day trip when just about all the clothes he owned fit into a carry-on anyway?—but Naomi had, so they went down to the bag claim, collected Naomi’s bag, and drove out into the suburbs.

When they stepped into the house, Matt blinked, paused, and clicked with his tongue a few times just to verify what his senses were telling him. Yep. This house was _enormous._

“Here it is!” said Dr. Franken. “Home sweet home. Naomi can show you where to put your bags, and we can come together in the living room for cheese and crackers.”

“That sounds great,” said Matt, taking one step forward and promptly tripping over a pair of shoes, too close by the door for him to have caught when sweeping with his cane and too small for him to have noticed in his first impression of the house.

“Matt!” Naomi grabbed his arm, saving him from face-planting into the hardwood floor. “Are you okay?” Before waiting for an answer, she turned to her parents and snapped, “You _guys._ I _told_ you we had to keep the floors clear for Matt.”

“I’m fine, really,” Matt said, because he was, but he had to stand around listening to apologies for a few minutes before he and Naomi could escape to go put their bags in Naomi’s room.

Naomi’s room faced the east, with big windows that cast stretches of warmth over the floor but let in small, cold drafts of fresh air. The air flow around the furniture helped Matt identify the shapes of the bed, dresser, desk, and a couple of bookshelves against one wall. It was a really nice room, and Matt would have told Naomi so when she said, “Sorry again about my parents. I’ll be better about keeping an eye out for crap they left laying around. I really did _tell_ them to pick up a little bit.”

“Naomi,” said Matt, grasping her hand, “I grew up in a home with dozens of orphans with physical and behavioral issues. I promise you I have dealt with way, _way_ bigger messes than a pair of shoes on the floor.”

Sitting around eating cheese and crackers in the living room was...odd. The living room itself was nothing like the dingy little den where Matt had watched his father fighting on their old TV—more like the lobby at the visitors’ center at ESU, all polished surfaces and expensive-feeling, uncomfortable furniture. Mr. and Dr. Franken were nice, but in a way that made it clear they weren’t exactly sure what to talk about. Or maybe it was more that they weren’t sure what they were _supposed_ to talk about, once they’d exhausted the subject of Matt and Naomi’s classes and how they’d met. Mr. Franken mentioned that Naomi’s sister Esther was spending Thanksgiving with her boyfriend and his family—no rescue from that corner, it seemed—and then, apparently for lack of anything better to talk about, expounded on the boyfriend, who worked in the music industry, and the boyfriend’s parents, who were a banker and an interior designer. No wonder Mr. Franken liked them, thought Matt—architects and interior designers probably had a lot to discuss with each other.

“Dad!” said Naomi in a low voice, and Mr. Franken fell silent.

In the awkward pause that followed, Matt tried to untangle the undercurrent of the exchange. The only conclusion he could draw was that Naomi was worried about making Matt feel bad, talking about Esther’s boyfriend’s rich parents when Matt’s dad was dead and had spent his whole life just trying to make ends meet. Matt didn’t need to be protected that way, though. He wasn’t _embarrassed_ about being an orphan, or about who his dad had been, so he cleared his throat and said, “My dad was a boxer.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Franken. “Like, Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, that kind of boxer?”

 _Well, he wasn’t a dog,_ thought Matt, wondering what other kind of boxer Dr. Franken might have had in mind. “Yeah,” he said. “You guys probably would have gotten along. He always needed a good dentist.”

“I can imagine,” said Dr. Franken, a little bit of humor warming her voice, but again, the conversation seemed to die. 

Matt...didn’t have a great feeling about how this trip was going.

That night, as he sat in the family room (as opposed to the living room) watching the news with Mr. Franken, he could hear Dr. Franken and Naomi talking in the kitchen on the other side of the first floor. The news anchor wouldn’t stop speculating about the details of a shooting where they just didn’t _know_ enough to say anything worthwhile, so without really meaning to eavesdrop, Matt zoned out and found himself overhearing Dr. Franken and Naomi’s conversation.

“I hope you’re going to get a haircut while you’re in town,” said Dr. Franken. “It’s getting a little out of control.”

“ _Mom._ ” Naomi sounded irritated in a way Matt had never heard. “It’s fine, and they actually do have hair stylists in New York. Stop nagging.”

“I’m a mom. That’s what I’m here for.”

Naomi set something down on the granite countertop—a plate, maybe? “I hope you’re not gonna say that kind of stuff around Matt,” she said. “His mom left his family when he was a baby. She didn’t even come to see him when he was blinded, or when his dad died.”

There was a long silence. Dr. Franken’s heart was pounding, as was Naomi’s, but it was hard to tell from across the house just what the cause of their stress was. Matt felt a sick feeling in his stomach. Finally, Dr. Franken said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I have to ask you, though, sweetheart, is there anything I _can_ say around Matt?”

Shit. Shit shit shit. Well, eavesdroppers never did hear good of themselves. Matt pulled his attention away from their conversation and focused again on the inane news anchor. He made a mental note to himself to be really understanding if Mr. or Dr. Franken stuck their feet in their mouths at any point. He didn’t want to come off as overly sensitive.

Thanksgiving dinner didn’t get any less awkward. The food was delicious, the kind of high-quality turkey that St. Agnes had never had the money to provide for its wards, and Mr. Franken was a great cook, but Naomi and her mother seemed to be engaged in a full-on feud, and Mr. Franken didn’t seem to know whose side to take. 

“This turkey’s delicious, Mr. Franken,” Matt said.

Mr. Franken was so grateful for the chance to talk about something meaningless that he didn’t even tell Matt again to call him “Daniel,” instead engaging in an in-depth discourse about how to prepare a turkey so it didn’t dry out in the oven. Mr. Franken was a big believer in fresh herbs and regularly checking your oven’s temperature with a thermometer. Since Matt had never made a turkey in his life, all he could comment on was what particular things he found especially tasty.

The rest of the trip passed more or less like that, and on the plane ride back to New York, Matt thought that Naomi was even more stressed-out than he was. “Hey,” he said when it became obvious that Naomi wasn’t going to be proffering a lot of conversation, “your parents were great.”

“Depends on your definition of ‘great,’” said Naomi, “but thanks.” She lay her head on Matt’s shoulder, and despite the sense that he was going to pop like an overfull balloon in the awful, oppressively loud plane, Matt felt himself begin to relax. 

“What were you and your mom fighting about?”

Naomi sighed. “It’s really hard to explain things to them, especially my mom. We’ve always been really close, but—I don’t know. It’s like she’s on her own little planet, and anything that doesn’t fit into her worldview, she just doesn’t want to deal with it.”

“That’s not on you, though,” Matt pointed out. He’d suspected that he was part of what they were fighting about, but it sounded like there was probably more to it.

“I guess,” said Naomi, not sounding terribly convinced. 

“I got along pretty well with your dad.” It was true, though they hadn’t really talked about themselves so much as they’d talked about cooking, the weather, and whether they thought the latest military actions in Sokovia were more about unrest in the region or Tony Stark’s bottom line. 

Naomi tapped her fingers against Matt’s chest, sending vibrations rattling through him. He liked it a lot better than the vibrations coming up from the floor of the plane against his feet. “That’s good,” she said. “I don’t know. Everything just seemed simpler at school.”

He knew what she meant, he thought. At school, they could more or less do what they wanted. But Naomi had a whole other world she had to fit into. And in a sense, Matt supposed, he did, too. 

When they got back, there was only a week and a half of classes before the finals period began, and everybody was stressed out of their minds prepping for tests and writing final papers. Two nights in a row, Naomi showed up at Matt’s dorm room, crying because she’d had a fight with her mother. “I can’t _deal_ with this now,” she said on the second night. “It’s _finals_ week.”

“We’ll get through it one day at a time,” said Matt, but he wasn’t sure how comforting he was. He had his own stresses. His calculus teacher was being a real dick about giving him study materials he could actually use, and Matt had never been the world’s best math student to begin with. He was probably going to have to go complain to Disability and Accessibility Services, and he _hated_ doing that. 

He and Naomi clung to each other on Matt’s bed. Matt’s roommate Dustin was AWOL, so they had the place to themselves. Matt wasn’t entirely sure Dustin was going to finish the semester, much less his degree.

The day before Matt’s first final, for Spanish 301, Naomi wanted to meet in her dorm lounge for lunch. Matt brought his laptop and headphones, so they could look at each other’s papers for sociology if they had time after lunch. He hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours since they’d gotten back from Chicago, and he wasn’t even sure if what he’d written made any sense.

Naomi was oddly quiet as she heated up soup for them in the microwave. There was something almost aggressive about her movements and posture, but Matt was at a loss to interpret the signals he was getting. Maybe she’d had another fight with her mom. He felt suddenly pissed at Dr. Franken. Couldn’t she lay off whatever the deal was between her and Naomi long enough for Naomi to get through her final exams? The end of someone’s first semester of college was stressful enough without parents picking fights.

They ate their soup with plastic spoons, hot enough that it dulled Matt’s sense of taste a little, and talked about their exam schedules. Wednesday was going to be particularly brutal for Naomi—sociology in the morning, biology in the afternoon, and she couldn’t even relax after that, because her history final was Thursday morning. Matt made a mental note to get her coffee and a muffin after she got out of the biology final. 

“We need to talk.”

Matt set down his spoon. “Thought that’s what we were doing,” he pointed out.

“No, I know.” Naomi’s right hand was fidgeting, tapping the bowl of her spoon repeatedly against the edge of the table. The noise was distracting, and Matt forced himself to focus on what she was saying. “It’s about...us.”

“Okay,” said Matt slowly. That sounded...serious, and not necessarily in a good way.

“Matt, I really—” Naomi sniffed and swallowed. “You’re a _really_ great guy, and I’ve _really_ loved being with you, but I think maybe—maybe we need to take a break.”

“Take a break,” Matt repeated. The words didn’t seem like real words to him, just random sounds.

“I was talking to my mom again last night, and—I don’t know, I have _so_ much going on right now, college is such a big step up from high school, and I really think I have to—”

“Hold on,” said Matt. “‘Take a break.’ That means break up, right? That’s like a euphemism. You’re breaking up with me.” The words hurt coming out, like they were physical things that didn’t want to make the journey up out of his throat.

“It’s not you,” said Naomi, which was both not an answer to the question and not honest, if her pulse and the way she was holding herself were any indication. “I have to, to spend more time on my schoolwork. I’m not doing great in bio and I _really_ need to be able to talk to my mom about it.”

“Why can’t you talk to your mom about it?” asked Matt. He could hear his voice getting louder, but it seemed to be out of his control. “You’re fighting about me? I get it, she doesn’t like me, but I don’t get why. What did I ever do to her?”

“It’s not that she doesn’t like you. She just—she worries about me getting too intense too fast, which I always do, and with you, it’s—I love you, I do, but you’ve got so much going on. It’s a lot, you know? It’s too much.”

By _It’s too much_ , she meant _you’re too much._ Too much trouble, too much time, too much inconvenience. He always had been, Matt thought, half-disbelievingly. A hundred dreams died sudden, brutal deaths. He knew it was going to hurt like hell really soon, but at the moment, he just felt numb. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He could have pointed out that they were both at a really stressful point in the semester, and that maybe it would be a good idea to table this discussion until they’d made it through finals week, or at least until Naomi had gotten past her history exam on Thursday, but he didn’t. What was the point? You couldn’t change somebody’s mind for them, that wasn’t how the world worked. “I guess I should go, then,” he said.

He went back to his room, threw his cane and laptop and headphones on Dustin’s empty bed, and cried into his pillow until he fell asleep.

His Spanish exam the next morning came and went in a haze. He hadn’t studied the previous day at all, but whatever, the grammar was all familiar to Matt, and he could guess vocabulary from context. Vivian, the woman from Disability and Accessibility Services who administered his test, touched his hand as he was putting away his things. “Matt, are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”

Matt shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

He went back to his dorm, edited his sociology paper and e-mailed it to the professor, and went to sleep again. At least, he thought, there wasn’t a final exam in sociology. He didn’t know if he could sit in the same room with Naomi right now and calmly take an exam. 

He didn’t have any finals the next day, so he stayed in his room and studied all day, not even taking a break to eat. By the evening, Matt felt completely empty and hollow inside, physically, mentally, emotionally. He couldn’t imagine getting up and going to take Professor Douchebag’s calculus final the next day.

A few blocks away, Matt could hear the strains of a party. He vaguely remembered a guy in his criminal justice class inviting him before the break—some kind of end-of-the-semester frat party—but he’d never seriously considered going. The kinds of parties he and Naomi went to were the kind where there were never any more than ten people, there was never any alcohol involved, and the main activities were things like movies, board games, and discussing politics. Matt had never felt any urge to go to one of those loud, crowded parties he overheard sometimes, where people played drinking games and blasted the Beastie Boys and Smash Mouth at head-splitting volumes. In fact, the idea had always been absolutely repellent to him.

Matt got out of bed and found some clothes to put on that smelled moderately less disgusting than the ones he was wearing. He wanted to crawl out of his skin. Maybe going to a party where he could drink himself out of his mind was the next best thing.

“Hey, Matt,” said Jesse from Intro to Criminal Justice when Matt knocked on the frat house door, sounding surprised. “You here for the party?”

Matt shrugged. “You said I should come by.”

“Yeah, I did. Come on in.” He ushered Matt in with a hand on his shoulder and then grabbed Matt’s arm, practically dragging him over to a couch against the wall in what Matt imagined was a living room of some sort. “Let me get you set up over here,” said Jesse. “Sit down, it’s a couch.” Matt contemplated taking his arm back and protesting this manhandling, but it didn’t matter. The place was loud and crowded enough that finding his way without bumping into someone would be a legitimate issue. 

“Hey,” yelled Jesse over Matt’s head. “Joe! This is Matt from my criminal justice class. You get him whatever he wants to drink, okay?” To Matt, he said, “What’s your pleasure?”

Matt hadn’t drunk any alcohol in over a year, since the last time Courtney had smuggled in some vodka from her drug-dealer boyfriend. “Scotch on the rocks?” Was that the kind of thing they had at frat parties? Matt really couldn’t stomach the idea of cheap beer right now.

“Shit, dude, I should have known you had classy taste,” said Jesse. “I love this guy!” he shouted to Joe. “Scotch on the rocks for the future Supreme Court Justice over here!”

Matt sat on the couch for a while, alternating scotch with screwdrivers. Joe the bartender and his occasional replacement Rob seemed willing to give Matt whatever he asked for. As Matt had suspected, the question of IDs or whether Matt—or anyone else—was 21 or not never even came up. A couple of people came by and said hello to him, but nobody stopped to talk; Matt imagined that a blind guy in the corner would be a curiosity for a party, but one with short-lived entertainment value. Around him was a perpetual game of beer pong, rotating players in and out; a small cluster of guys played darts outside of the kitchen; a large cluster of girls was trying to remember the lyrics to a song by Rihanna, with a couple of guys shouting crude suggestions occasionally. The music was loud enough to be physically painful, but Matt was drunk enough that the pain actually took him to a kind of meditative place, half aware of what was going on and half floating in his own head, breathing deeply and sipping his drink without tasting it. 

“Hey!”

Matt didn’t realize the woman was talking to him until she followed that up with, “Hey, guy on the couch with the sunglasses!”

The voice was familiar, as was the perfume, but Matt couldn’t place it until the woman added, “Aren’t you in my American poetry class?”

With effort, Matt lifted his heavy head and turned his head in the direction of the voice. “I don’t know, am I?”

“Oh, sorry,” said the woman, but she didn’t sound overly apologetic or flush warm with embarrassment, which was a point in her favor in Matt’s book. “My name’s Holly—I usually sit, like, three people over from you.”

“Okay,” Matt said, not making an effort to sound too interested. “I’m Matt.”

“Right.” She sat down next to him on the couch, probably so she could be heard over the noise of the party. It didn’t really matter to Matt, so he returned his attention to his drink. He listened with half his mind as she said, “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Matt contemplated telling her that, contrary to popular belief, sometimes blind people felt the need to get hammered just like sighted people did, but he couldn’t figure out a way to make that both make sense and not come off like he wanted to get into a fistfight with her, so he just said, “Oh?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re super smart, right? I figured you were probably spending this part of the semester in the library or something.”

“Mm.” That was sort of flattering, or would have been, had Matt been more sober and less miserable. “Well. My girlfriend just broke up with me, so.”

“Ouch,” said Holly, wincing. “My boyfriend broke up with me last week. Said he needed to focus on his classes going into finals. Whatever, that’s a lame excuse. What is it with these assholes breaking up with us right before the holidays?”

“She’s not an asshole,” Matt said, feeling obscurely offended on Naomi’s behalf. 

Holly shrugged and sipped her—vodka sour? No, amaretto sour—the alcohol was messing with Matt’s senses, just a little bit. “If you say so,” she said. “Me, I have a general rule of thumb when it comes to breakups—if I break up with somebody, it’s because he’s an asshole, and if somebody breaks up with me, it’s because he’s an asshole.”

That startled a laugh out of Matt. “You’ve got it all—got it all covered.”

“It’s worked for me so far,” said Holly. “Hey, whatcha drinking there?”

The change of subject threw Matt for a second, but after a moment he mustered the presence of mind to say, “Scotch on the rocks.”

“Hey, Joe,” called Holly over to where one of the frat brothers was tending bar in the corner, “when you get a chance, could you grab my friend here another scotch on the rocks?”

“Sure thing, Hol! Hang tight, Matt.”

“Oh, I don’t—” Matt started—in spite of the alcohol, he was starting to come out of the haze of self-involved sadness he’d been in for the last couple of days and realized that, despite all expectations to the contrary, somebody was actually trying to engage in social interaction with him. “I’m okay,” he said.

“Well, if you can’t drink it, God knows I can,” said Holly. “Come on, Matt, let’s bitch about our exes and have a good time, huh?”

Matt took another sip of his drink, savoring it. Maybe—maybe Matt _could_ be the kind of guy who went to parties like this and had a good time. Maybe once he got all his thoughts and feelings about Naomi out there, they wouldn’t hurt so much. “Okay,” he said to Holly. “So what’s your pre-holiday breakup story?”

He and Holly talked for two hours, having started with their breakups and moved on to their families and then to what they were studying. Holly was a math major and was taking American Poetry to fulfill a requirement, which explained why she disliked it so much; her parents were divorced, which Holly joked was the ideal state of being for rich parents but which Matt could tell really bothered her; her ex was an economics major named James who, in retrospect, she thought she should never have dated in the first place. Having never been to a loud party before, Matt had never thought of them as the kind of place where any kind of intimacy could possibly be formed, but they seemed to have carved out a little pocket for themselves on the couch, a little world where they could talk about whatever they wanted and somehow be isolated both from the rest of the party and the pressures of the rest of their lives.

By the time their voices were growing hoarse, the party had quieted down a bit—not because people were going home, but because people were passing out or hooking up in the bedrooms upstairs. Some people were still downstairs drinking, but the beer pong table had been abandoned and the drinkers were clustered around in small groups talking as Matt and Holly were. Upstairs, a woman groaned as she orgasmed and someone, either her or her partner, muffled it with a hand. 

One of the other people downstairs laughed, and Matt realized that the woman had been loud enough not just for him to hear, but for everyone else to hear, too, and he flushed. 

Holly made a considering noise. “Well, _somebody_ ’s having a good time.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Matt, forcing a laugh.

“Maybe she’s got the right idea. What do you think, dude?” she asked. “Rebound sex? Get over our asshole exes?”

Matt was taken aback, but he didn’t know why. Holly clearly wasn’t stymied by the usual obstacles of shyness and social convention when it came to things like this, either because the party atmosphere broke down those kinds of boundaries or just because she was a particularly bold person. On another day, when Matt was 100% sober and hadn’t spent the last few days feeling about as low as he could feel, he would have politely turned her down, told her that he wasn’t into casual sex, but tonight—tonight—Matt thought about the warmth of Naomi’s skin, the smell of her, the way it felt when she came and the reverberations of it shook her whole body. He thought about what it felt like to know that whatever else was going on, he could bring physical pleasure to another human being. And, almost without his consciously intending it, he said, “Okay.”

Holly’s heart jumped. “Seriously?” she said. “I was just kidding, I didn’t expect you to go for it.”

That figured. Once again, Matt had failed to read the signs. “Okay,” he said again. “Sorry.”

“No, no!” Holly grabbed his hand. “Don’t be! If you’re actually into the idea, that would be awesome. I wasn’t looking forward to getting through finals period with only my vibe and memories of sex with James to keep me company. You have a condom?”

“Not on me,” said Matt, feeling as if he had walked for a moment into somebody else’s life.

Holly made a dismissive noise and said, “Whatever, it’s a frat house, I know they’ve got them around somewhere. Lemme go ask Nick over there and we’ll go find a spot, huh?”

They ended up in the bedroom of some frat brother who was, according to Nick, camped out in the library. Matt sure hoped he had an extra set of clean sheets for when he was done studying.

Sex with Holly was...well, it was certainly different than with Naomi. Holly was a lot louder, a lot more actively involved, rolling around on top of Matt, leaving hickeys across his neck and chest, running her hands frantically over him like she couldn’t figure out where to put them. But she was just as into it, gave just as clear physical and verbal indications of what she wanted and how well Matt was achieving it. Her orgasm— _orgasms_ , Matt should have said, because she came twice—were just as intense, if not more, than either Naomi’s or Josh’s. Which kind of blew Matt’s mind. He _loved_ Naomi, and if he and Josh weren’t exactly friends, at least they’d known each other for years, and had things in common that separated them from most other people. He honestly hadn’t even remembered Holly from their poetry class, and she only remembered him as the smart blind guy, and yet the sex was working just as well.

“Hey, bro,” she said, “you with me?”

“I’m with you,” said Matt. He stopped thinking so much and just went with it.

Matt met Holly once more after that, at the poetry final, but after he came back from the short-term housing dorm at St. Agnes for the spring semester, they didn’t have any classes together, and that was okay with Matt. Holly had been great, but he didn’t think that what they were to each other was a long-term thing—they’d both needed something at a particular moment, gotten it, and moved on. 

After a semester of singlehood, Matt started going out with Emma when he got back to campus after the summer. This time, he didn’t go into it expecting true love and forever. Emma had cerebral palsy; Matt had met her at a student organization for students with disabilities. Emma, like Holly, was a math major, and she spent a lot of time talking about things that went completely over Matt’s head. She spent the rest of her time, though, talking about accessibility issues on campus and disability theory, and that was an area where Matt could talk as long and as passionately as she could. Sex with Emma was interesting; she’d read a lot about ways for people whose bodies worked differently to have fun in the bedroom, and so Matt learned a lot about sex toys and different positions. It could be fun, and it was good training for exercising control over his body. Out of the bedroom, though, they fought a fair amount. Emma was an intense person, and Matt wasn’t entirely unhappy when they broke up—they still saw each other regularly, but it was a lot less stressful being Emma’s friend than her boyfriend.

Lucas was Matt’s first attempt at dating a guy, since he’d liked having sex with Josh and he figured he might have better luck with men. It was weird at first, and Matt felt a little guilty, but ultimately he reasoned that God had given him impulses that were a lot more destructive than being attracted to men, and by tending the more loving part of himself rather than the angry part, he was committing no sin. 

Lucas played intermural rugby, and his muscles made Matt tense with something that was half lust and half envy—Matt really needed to get back into some kind of exercise routine. He was majoring in Japanese literature, which Matt knew absolutely nothing about, but he liked listening to Lucas talk about it. Neither of them had ever tried anal before, but, figuring that college was a good time for experimenting, they gave it a go, taking turns giving and receiving. Anal, Matt decided, was something he really had to be in the right mood for—the necessary preparations were kind of weird for him, both when it was his ass involved and when it was Lucas’s, and the end result could either be fantastic when Matt was really turned on or just kind of uncomfortable if he wasn’t. Lucas had a harder time with the blind thing than either Naomi or Emma had, so the relationship didn’t last long.

Clarissa, Diane, Will, Robin, Jennifer, Brian—Matt’s junior year was a whirlwind of short-lived relationships, some of them more intense than others. Matt didn’t know what was wrong with him, that he couldn’t make any of them last. He liked to think that he had positive qualities to bring to the table; he wasn’t the angry, helpless little kid that he had been. But somehow, things never seemed to work out. Sometimes the problem was something he actually did—Will, for instance, had been weirded out when the things Matt heard crept into his sleep and he woke panting and fearful in the middle of the night, and Jennifer thought he spent too much time studying and not enough time with her. Sometimes, Matt being blind and poor was a problem—he couldn’t afford to eat out as often as Clarissa liked to, and Robin got terribly embarrassed whenever he asked for things like Braille menus or help reading price tags, especially when he had to argue with people to get assistance. Sometimes Matt had to end things because he didn’t have the time to throw himself into a relationship the way the other person deserved. In every case, though, the common denominator seemed to be him.

He went to the Catholic student center, which was kind of a first for him. He’d been attending church irregularly and not doing much by way of confession, feeling that he’d done more than his fair share of praying and confessing during his time at St. Agnes, but talking to a priest was a more familiar, less intimidating idea than finding a counselor at the Student Health Center.

“Hello,” the priest greeted when Matt walked in. “I’m Father Huff. If you’re here for confessions, my hours officially start in about forty-five minutes, but if you’re in a hurry, we can do something quick now and make an appointment for later this week to talk more fully.”

“I, uh....” Matt fiddled with his cane. “I kind of just wanted to talk. Can I make an appointment?”

Matt could tell the second that Father Huff realized he was blind. His posture changed, became less businesslike and more confused. After a moment, he said, “No, it’s...we can talk now if you’d like. Let’s go to my office. Would you like me to help you?”

“That’d be nice,” said Matt, and he held out his hand.

Father Huff’s office was a cramped little room that smelled of dust and incense. It felt very familiar to Matt, and he relaxed a little as he explained his situation to Father Huff. He talked about where he was coming from, how he’d ended up at ESU and what he was studying there. He talked a little about his history with romantic relationships, carefully editing his stories to leave out his relationships with men and just how sexually intimate he’d gotten (though he had a sneaking suspicion Father Huff realized sex was involved). He explained that he _wanted_ marriage and a family, that he didn’t feel any calling to celibacy, but that he was starting to think God was sending him a message, that maybe he was meant to be alone.

Father Huff listened patiently; Matt imagined that on a college campus he probably got a fair amount of young people talking to him about their love lives. When Matt had finished talking, he said, “Well, I can’t tell you about God’s plan for you, but I had a couple of thoughts while you were talking. You say you don’t feel any call to celibacy, but it seems to me that you _do_ feel a call to the legal profession, to become a lawyer in order to make the world more just and help the needy. Is that a fair assessment?”

Matt hesitated and then nodded. “I guess I didn’t think about it that way,” he said, “but yeah. I’ve always been interested in the law. And with all the help I’ve gotten from other people—and with my dad always wanting me to use my mind to make something of myself—I guess I do feel obligated to do my best to use the law to help people.”

“I think that’s admirable,” said Father Huff. “Listen, Matthew. I’m sure you knew when you came to me that I couldn’t recommend your current habit of serial monogamy—it’s not in line with the Church’s teachings about sex outside of the marital bond, and it doesn’t seem to be doing you any good. You seem like a very smart and principled young man. What I’m going to suggest is that you focus less on your romantic life and more on using your gifts to succeed academically and serve your community. When it comes to your love life, don’t try so hard. If you’re meant to end up with one woman for the rest of your life, God will help you find her, you don’t have to date every woman you meet to look for her.”

That...made a lot of sense, actually. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “That really helps.”

He suspected that Father Huff wouldn’t approve of how Matt applied his advice over his senior year and the couple of years he spent working to save money for law school, but it was working for him. Instead of jumping into relationships, which he clearly sucked at, he spent most of his time working, studying, and volunteering, and devoted the time spent on his love life to the only part of it he was actually good at: sex. It seemed he’d hit upon the ideal solution. He wasn’t opposed to dating, and if he met someone he liked enough and who liked him enough to make it worth the effort of forming a longer relationship, he’d give it a try, but in the meantime, he was careful, had regular check-ups to test for STIs, and met a lot of interesting people he would never have gotten to know if he had been following the Church’s teachings on premarital sex. 

He didn’t know why he’d never thought of it before. A one-night stand was like a perfectly-formed relationship in miniature. There was a lot he didn’t know about the people he slept with, a lot they didn’t know about him, but there was something amazing about the thought that he knew things about them that the people they interacted with every day didn’t know, about the places on their bodies they liked to be touched, the noises they made when they were pleased or ecstatic, about the warmth and tenderness they could show to a relative stranger. There was something amazing about the thought that they knew him, too, that maybe they would remember him not as the blind law student that the rest of the world saw but as somebody they had shared a kind of intimacy with, if only for a little while.

Matt’s romantic history was one of repeated failure, but it had led him to a place where he was happy. The one time he got drunk and tried to explain this to Foggy, though, Foggy hadn’t understood. Instead, he’d just patted Matt’s hair over and over again and said, “Man oh man, buddy, we are gonna find you somebody great someday. ‘Cause you’re _awesome_ , and people are _dumb_ if they don’t get that.”

“Thanks, Foggy,” said Matt, relaxing under Foggy’s hand and thinking that he really didn’t need Foggy to understand about how Matt’s love life worked, as long as he kept petting Matt’s head like that.


	3. So twist and whisper the wrong name, I don't care nor do my ears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For all Foggy's talk of wingmen and 'luscious co-eds,' he doesn't actually seem all that comfortable with casual sex.

It became apparent to Matt pretty early on in his friendship with Foggy that, for all Foggy’s talk of wingmen and ‘luscious co-eds,’ he was averse to casual sex and preferred to wait until he was in a romantic relationship to be physically intimate. Matt could understand that—he’d felt the same way himself when he was younger—and it was his opinion that anybody who wanted sex with Foggy without the emotional intimacy was really missing out. Foggy was great, open and kind and funny, and anyone would be lucky to be with him, whether sex was in the picture or not. Foggy wanted a real, long-term romantic relationship and deserved to have one. 

Foggy, though, hadn’t seemed to figure that out about himself yet, and so he insisted on dragging Matt out to bars in hopes of hooking up. Matt didn’t mind. He became familiar with some of the bars around Columbia, got the entertainment of listening to Foggy try to chat women up, and had a few delightfully dirty quickies in men’s rooms or in the alleys behind the bars. As long as Foggy’s quest for sex didn’t interfere with his and Matt’s ability to study for their classes, Matt was willing to go along with it.

Tonight looked to be a particularly painful strikeout for Foggy. He was doing a good job of picking up when the woman he was talking to—Hannah, her name was—wasn’t interested in the topic of conversation, but his changes of subject were too eager and clumsy, making him seem desperate. Having never been anyone’s wingman before, Matt wasn’t sure exactly when and how often to insert himself in the conversation, but this was getting ridiculous. 

“Hey, Hannah,” he broke in to Foggy’s awkward ramble about NPR, “did you know Foggy’s mom wanted him to be a butcher? He knows a lot about local meats.” Hannah was obviously a foodie, one only had to listen to her talk about the dinner she’d had last week or smell the morel soup and gourmet olive oil whose scents clung to her hair in order to tell that.

“Um, yeah,” Foggy began, confused and sort of irritated at Matt, but Hannah seemed taken aback and honestly interested at Matt’s weird nonsequitur.

“No kidding?” she asked. “Do you know a good place to get duck? I’ve got a great recipe for duck à l’orange, but all my usual places have been letting me down lately.”

Since Foggy’s aunt and her husband still ran an artisanal butcher shop, Foggy did, in fact, know a good place to get duck. Matt smiled and quietly withdrew himself from the conversation. He could keep one ear on Foggy’s progress and still have some fun for himself tonight.

“Hey,” said the woman sitting next to Matt at the bar. “Is that guy talking about meat a friend of yours?”

“Yeah, he’s my roommate. Why?” Foggy hadn’t been Matt’s friend for long, but he was a good guy, and Matt wasn’t about to let strangers shit-talk him.

“Does he know his stuff?” she asked, which wouldn’t have been Matt’s first guess for what she was going to say. “About serving duck medium-rare, I mean? I always thought you had to serve poultry well-done.”

Matt laughed. “Well, his aunt and uncle run a butcher shop, so yeah, he does know his stuff, but speaking as someone who just likes food, if you get the bird from a reliable place, I think medium-rare’s fine. It’s the way you usually get duck in restaurants, anyway.” Having been served duck at a couple of admitted students’ weekends and receptions, Matt could speak with experience on this subject, something teenaged Matt could never have imagined.

“Huh. You know, I’ve never made duck, but I’ll have to try that sometime. I’m Charlotte, by the way.” She stuck out her hand, probably for a handshake; though her elbow popped when she extended the hand, a normal blind person probably still wouldn’t have known where to find it, so Matt sat and waited for her to pick up on the sunglasses and the white cane. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, a moment after the rise in resting heart rate told Matt she’d noticed his blindness. “That—that was rude of me.”

“What, introducing yourself?” Matt smiled at her. “We’re not in a Jane Austen novel.”

“Oh—no, I just—um, do you want to shake hands?”

“Sure.” He stuck his hand out, and she took it. Smooth hands, with calluses on the fingertips of the left hand—she probably played a string instrument, maybe guitar. “I’m Matt,” he said.

Charlotte was a grad student in history who lived just a few blocks from the bar, and she was, as she put it, between boyfriends at the moment. “Just so you don’t get the wrong idea,” she told him as they left the bar and headed to her place, “I don’t always do the casual hookup thing. It’s just, I’m studying for my comps this year—my PhD exams, that is—and I don’t really have time for a relationship right now.”

“No judgment here,” said Matt. “I’m in my first year of law school, I’ve got the same problem.”

“You see?” Charlotte said, like she’d been arguing this very point. “We gotta squeeze in some fun whenever we can.”

“That’s what she said,” he said, and Charlotte laughed.

“You’re a hoot.” Matt beamed at her. He’d gotten quite a few compliments over the years, but rarely on how much fun he was.

Charlotte, it turned out, didn’t like penetrative sex at all. That was A-OK with Matt—she gave amazing handjobs, and the noises she made when Matt’s mouth was on her breast and his leg between her thighs for her to rub against—well, they were beautiful. She was beautiful. She had soft skin, dotted with chicken pox scars like freckles that Matt could actually appreciate, and thick curly hair, and she smelled like old books. 

When they were done, Charlotte lay her head on Matt’s shoulder and sighed, mouthing the skin over his collarbone. “That was fun,” she said softly.

“It was,” Matt agreed. He laid a kiss on her hair. “Thanks for a great time. I’m glad we met.”

“Me too.” There was something impish in her tone. “How else would I know how to cook duck?”

Matt slept over at Charlotte’s; she didn’t have a roommate, and her bed, though old and very squeaky, was reasonably comfortable. In the morning, he bought coffee and pastries from the shop around the corner, since he had no idea how her kitchen was laid out, and they ate around her little table. 

Afterward, Charlotte said, “So, do you want to exchange numbers? Maybe do this again sometime?”

Matt caught the hesitation in her tone and set down his napkin (the pain au chocolat was a little messy). “We don’t have to if you don’t want,” he said. “We’re both busy people. This could just be a one-off, your call.”

Charlotte let out a loud breath, and her whole body seemed to relax. “No, we can totally do this again. I just—I didn’t want to give the impression that I was looking for a boyfriend or something, because I’m really not.”

“I get it,” Matt assured her. “We can just, you know. Squeeze in some fun whenever we can.”

Charlotte laughed, and they retrieved their phones from where they’d ended up last night. Matt told Charlotte his phone number, but when he unlocked his phone to enter hers, it announced, “Seven missed calls and ten missed text messages from Foggy.”

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” said Matt with feeling. He’d turned the ringer off last night without even really thinking about it, not wanting the sound it made when he got e-mails to interrupt his time with Charlotte. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Foggy might be trying to get a hold of him.

“Roommate?” Charlotte asked. 

“Roommate,” Matt confirmed. He stood up and gestured towards where he thought Charlotte’s front door was. “I better call him.”

Charlotte grabbed his cane and handed it to him. “Definitely,” she said. “Good luck.”

Foggy picked up the phone on the first ring. “Matt!” he said. His voice sounded breathless.

“Hey, Foggy,” said Matt sheepishly.

“Oh my _God_ , dude, where have you _been_? Are you okay? Do you need me to come someplace and get you? Why didn’t you answer your fucking phone?”

“Foggy, I’m fine.” Matt was really starting to feel embarrassed now. “I was, uh. At a friend’s, and the ringer was off. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls. What’s up?”

There was a silence at the other end; Matt would have thought the call had been cut off if he couldn’t hear Foggy breathing on the other end. Finally, Foggy shouted—actually _shouted_ , Matt had to jerk his ear away from the phone—“What’s _up_? My blind roommate fucking _disappeared_ from a bar without a word and wouldn’t answer his goddamned phone! I thought you’d been kidnapped by kidney thieves or fallen down a manhole or something! And now it turns out you were just hooking up with some girl while I was freaking the fuck out? Why the hell didn’t you _tell_ me?”

Matt swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I—it just didn’t occur to me. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Foggy let out a loud breath, and when he spoke again, he sounded a little calmer. “Do you need help getting home?”

“No,” said Matt, halfway between contrite at worrying Foggy and irritated by his own contrition. It was his life; Foggy wasn’t his mother or his keeper. “I’ll be back in—” He quickly checked the time on his watch and ran through the Saturday bus schedule in his head. “Forty-five minutes.”

“All right, dude, see you then.” Foggy hung up. 

Matt slowly put his phone back in his pocket and went back into Charlotte’s apartment. “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

“In the doghouse with the roomie?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “Been there. Living alone has its perks.”

When Matt got back to his room at student housing, Foggy spent a good ten minutes reading him the riot act. Matt considered pointing out that they had gone to the bar with the specific purpose of hooking up, but it seemed rude to interrupt Foggy when he was on such a roll. Finally, Foggy ended with an instruction to call him any time Matt was going to leave for the night to, as Foggy put it, "do the deed."

Actually irritated now—being blind didn’t make Matt any less of an adult—he snapped, “What, are _you_ going to tell _me_ every time you leave to meet up with a girl?”

“Of course I will,” Foggy said, sounding completely honest. “It’s just common courtesy, dude.”

This took the wind out of Matt’s sails, and he ended up looking in Foggy’s direction with what he was sure was a ridiculous expression on his face. None of Matt’s roommates had ever given a shit about him spending the night elsewhere. “Seriously?” he said.

“Seriously,” said Foggy. “And maybe we need a code phrase, for when you have emergencies. Like, okay, if you’re hooking up and the night’s going well, you can say, ‘Hey, Foggy, having a good time, see you tomorrow.’ And if there’s a problem and you need help, you can say, ‘Hey, Foggy, with friends, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’”

“If I needed your help, why couldn’t I just say, ‘Hey, Foggy, I need your help’?”

“I don’t know, dude, you don’t want to offend anybody? Somebody’s got a gun to your head? Any reason, whatever.”

Matt raised an eyebrow. In his admittedly short acquaintance with Foggy, he hadn’t yet been introduced to this fanciful streak. “You think somebody’s going to put a gun to my head during sex but also let me make a phone call? That would be a pretty generous sex kidnapper.”

“I don’t _know_ , Matt,” said Foggy. His voice wasn’t angry, just kind of—desperate, and tired. “I just—you’ve gotta let me know when you’re gonna be out all night, okay? I mean, congrats on your obvious skill with the ladies, but don’t leave me hanging like that again. I was really worried.”

It had been a long time since anybody worried about Matt like that, because they cared about him. Matt felt a compunction of remorse in his heart. “All right,” he said. “I will. And, uh, likewise, with the code phrases. I mean, you could call me with those phrases if you had a sex emergency.”

Foggy snorted. “I’d have to actually be getting laid to be having sex emergencies, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“How’d it go with Hannah?” Matt asked, smiling now that the conversation had turned less serious.

Foggy groaned. “Ugh. At the end of the night, she didn’t want _my_ number, she wanted my aunt Cheryl’s. I’m doomed to be her meat middleman. And get your mind out of the gutter, Murdock,” he said when Matt laughed at this. “You know what I mean.”

Over the next few months, Matt got a lot of use out of the “having a good time, see you tomorrow” code phrase, but he didn’t need to use the emergency one until one night, after some fantastic sex on the couch in the backroom of a club, he realized that his wallet was gone. He didn’t know if the thief was Sandy, the woman he’d been eating out, or if someone else had come in and he’d been too out of it to pay attention, but either way, he was stuck a long way from Columbia without money or his MetroCard. Thankfully, whoever had stolen his wallet out of his jacket pocket had missed his phone, which Matt had kept in his jeans pocket during the encounter with Sandy. 

It was after midnight, but given that it was a Saturday, Foggy would probably still be up catching up on all the TV he’d missed during the week. Matt sighed and had his phone dial Foggy’s number.

After two rings, Foggy picked up. “Matt! What’s the story, morning glory?”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Um. Don’t let the bedbugs bite?”

“Whoa, seriously?” Matt could hear Foggy pausing what sounded like Law and Order SVU in the background. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’m fine,” said Matt with a sigh. “Just, uh, stranded in Queens with no wallet.”

“I _knew_ it! Did I or did I not say that girl with the orange hair was trouble?”

“You did, but being blind, I had a hard time figuring out who you were talking about.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” Foggy was putting on shoes now, squeezing the phone between his ear and his shoulder. His voice always sounded much closer when he did that. “You want me to give my folks a call? You’re actually closer to their place than you are to campus.”

Matt shuddered in horror at the idea of meeting Foggy’s parents under these circumstances. “I don’t want to inconvenience you,” he began.

“But you’d rather drop a bowling ball on your toes than call my parents,” Foggy finished. “No worries, I totally get it. Will they let you stay at the club until I get there? It might be a while.”

“I’ll work it out,” said Matt, and he would. The bartender seemed to have a soft spot for him; if he told the guy what had happened, Matt was pretty sure the bartender would help him explain things to the cops and let him hang out even if he couldn’t buy anything. “Thanks, Fog.”

“Eh,” said Foggy, “What are friends for?”

Foggy could say what he liked, but in Matt’s book, a rescue like that was above and beyond the call of duty of everyday friendship, and he tried to pay Foggy back as best he could. He didn’t have much experience playing wingman, but he certainly tried his best, and he thought that Foggy ended up with a few more phone numbers than he might otherwise have had. Foggy had a tendency to eat more fast food than was good for him, so Matt, who’d become something of a master at preparing cheap, vaguely nutritious foods that could be made in a microwave, tried to get a decent meal into him every now and then. And Matt took pride in the fact that Foggy’s CV was going to look better, and his conscience might be lighter, due to the many volunteer opportunities Matt had become familiar with over the years and which he encouraged Foggy to join him in taking advantage of.

It was kind of a perfect set-up, really. Matt could take care of his own sexual desires, but pretty much anything else he might have gotten from a relationship—companionship, affection, emotional intimacy—he got from his friendship with Foggy, and he liked to think that he gave as good as he got. Foggy at least seemed happy, if occasionally frustrated that Matt got laid more often than he did. He never gave the impression that he was just putting up with Matt, or that he thought Matt was overwhelming or stressful to be around. 

None of this stopped Matt’s instincts from reacting with reflexive fear and rejection when Foggy invited Matt back to his parents’ place in Long Island City for Christmas.

Unlike the dorms at ESU, graduate and professional student housing at Columbia stayed open over the holidays, so it wasn’t like Matt didn’t have anywhere to go. He’d didn’t know why Foggy was so horrified that he’d stayed there over Thanksgiving. “Foggy, I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll catch up on studying.”

“Okay, first, you don’t need to catch up on anything, you’re at the top of our class. And second, if I leave you here alone, you’ll probably have orgies in here over the break, and I’ll come back and find you’ve replaced my bed with one of those giant vibrating beds they have in Vegas hotels.”

Matt blinked. “What are you talking about? I don’t have sex in here anymore.” He’d only done it once or twice—after Foggy had walked in on him with Samantha from Intro to Criminal Law and had fled with apologies that made Matt feel more guilty than appeased, Matt had resolved, both to himself and to Foggy, to handle sexual encounters elsewhere.

“Sorry, dude, I know, bad joke. I just really don’t like the idea of you being alone in this crappy dorm over the break while I’m celebrating and eating home-cooked food and opening presents and shit. Not to be all Ron Weasley about it, but come on. There are always a ton of people there over Christmas, one more isn’t going to be any trouble.”

Sincerity. Matt had no defenses against it. Instead of directly arguing, he asked, “Ron Weasley? Is that a Harry Potter character?”

Foggy put a hand to his forehead and shook his head, his hair swishing over his shoulders. “Matt, you sweet summer child, now it’s official. You have to come home with me, and we will grab my Harry Potter movie collection, and when we get back to the dorms, we will _marathon_ those movies, with my patented Foggy Nelson audio description. And then we’ll watch the first one again with the ‘Wizard People, Dear Reader’ audio track. I have obviously been failing you as a roommate here.”

Matt smiled despite himself. Foggy was about as far away from failing as a roommate as was humanly possible. But still, the memory of that Thanksgiving trip with Naomi loomed large in his mind. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Traveling with someone can be an awful lot of forced togetherness. We don’t want to, you know, get sick of each other or something.”

“Matt,” said Foggy with exaggerated patience, “my parents live in Queens. This isn’t exactly a cross-country road trip we’re making here. And if we haven’t gotten sick of each other after three months sharing this uber-classy dorm room, what makes you think we’re gonna get sick of each other after a couple of days with my family?”

For all that Matt was generally good at using his words to get the desired result, somehow he still found himself sitting next to Foggy on the subway out to Long Island City, where Foggy’s parents had moved after Foggy and his siblings had graduated from high school, carrying a bottle of red wine (which Foggy had assured him that Mrs. Nelson loved) as a Christmas gift. He still wasn’t sure how Foggy had won this particular argument, but so far this trip was beating the hell out of the plane ride to Chicago, so Matt supposed he couldn’t complain too much. And when Foggy’s parents greeted him like he was just one more welcome guest at a huge party they were throwing, neither talking to him like he was stupid nor making a big deal out of his glasses and cane nor showing signs that they resented having to help him navigate their crowded two-bedroom, well. Then Matt thought that maybe, just maybe, this would all turn out okay.

Matt had never met anyone like Foggy’s family. His dad’s hair was as long as Foggy’s, and he built his own furniture with supplies from the hardware store he still owned and managed. His mom had artistic endeavors scattered throughout their apartment and was eager to show Matt her pottery and ceramics, letting him run his hands over the glazed dishes and oddly-shaped vases. His uncle, who apparently lived with his parents for most of the year, was a jazz bassist-slash-plumber. Foggy had an older brother and sister—twins—called Daphne and Shaggy. (“My parents really weren’t _thinking_ of the Scooby Doo characters,” Foggy insisted. “Shaggy’s real name is David. But he grew some really grody facial hair, like, freshman year in high school, and the nickname stuck.”

“So now your parents have sons named Shaggy and Foggy.”

“What’s your point?”)

But was the most surprising to Matt, and also the most comforting, was that everyone brought friends with them, straining the little apartment to bursting but in a way that didn’t seem confining or claustrophobic at all. Shaggy brought not only his wife Kelly but also Kelly’s brother Al; Daphne brought her best friend Christie; Foggy’s little sister Candace, who was a sophomore in college (“She was a surprise baby!”) brought her friend Sahar, who was from Egypt and was, according to Candace, super-interested in Christmas in America as a sociocultural phenomenon. Matt was perfectly willing to believe it after Sahar followed up this introduction by saying, “You could write a really interesting paper on ‘The War on Christmas’ alone. Hey, Matt, can I pick your brain about American Catholicism sometime?”

“Um, sure,” said Matt. 

The only one who didn’t bring a friend was Foggy’s cousin Tamara, Edgar the jazz bassist’s daughter. Tamara held herself a little apart from the general Nelson chaos like a National Geographic reporter observing from a distance; to Matt, who was feeling a little overwhelmed (if in a pleasant way), her dry commentary on things like “Aunt Anna’s drawer of misfit pots” and the “Nelson tradition of death-metal hair” was funny in a distinct but familiarly Foggy-like way, and he hung out in the living room with her while Foggy caught up on everything that had been going on with the rest of his family.

Staying with the Nelsons couldn’t possibly have been more different from staying with the Frankens. There was literally no extra space in their apartment with thirteen people crammed into a two-bedroom, much less the vast amounts of it Naomi’s family had had, and there was never any silence. Matt didn’t think he heard a single gap in the conversation that wasn’t filled by somebody; the Nelsons were talkers, and no two ways about it. Despite the sensation of being a sardine in an extremely loud can, Matt found he didn’t really mind. Nobody paid any particular attention to him, but they didn’t exclude him either—as far as the Nelsons were concerned, Matt seemed to be on par with their niece or their daughter-in-law or any of their children’s friends, one more member of the large ensemble cast filling their busy lives. It was a little like being back at St. Agnes, except that here, people actually liked him and wanted him there.

On Christmas Eve, Foggy’s family traditionally bundled themselves onto the subway to go back to the Methodist church in Manhattan the Nelson children had been raised in. Candace was part of something called “The Christmas Choir,” which, as far as Matt could tell, was like a sort of super-group of people who had sung in the choir as children or teenagers and came back together in various conformations every year to sing a couple of Christmas songs. Foggy, who said he only ever went to church on Christmas anyway and could take or leave it, offered to stay home with Matt and Sahar and help Matt find a midnight mass if he wanted.

“Is it bad if I go, as a Muslimah?” Sahar asked. “I have an anthropological interest.”

Mrs. Nelson laughed. “Of course you can go if you want, though I don’t know how anthropologically interesting the sermon will be. Our pastor’s got a bad habit of picking one punch line per sermon and repeating it over and over again.”

“But of course, I’m singing, and nobody wants to miss the musical event of the year,” Candace put in, cheerfully ironic.

“Of course not,” said Matt, who liked Candace, as he liked pretty much all the Nelsons. “I’m happy to come along too, Foggy, though I probably will take you up on the midnight mass thing afterwards.”

“You sure?” Foggy asked. “Grandma O’Donoghue was mega-uncomfortable idea with the idea of going to a Protestant church.”

“Foggy, I don’t know how to break this to you, but I’m not actually your grandmother.” That got a laugh from everyone around the table, and Matt grinned, pleased. “I probably won’t take communion, but that’s not gonna bother anyone, right?”

“Dude, we don’t even do communion on Christmas Eve. That's at the 11:00 service.”

Matt shrugged. “Perfect, then. Let’s go enjoy the musical event of the year.”

The Methodist church was interesting. It smelled different, and the way the service and the sanctuary were arranged gave Matt a kind of similar feeling to when someone moved the furniture around in a familiar place. He didn’t mind it, though. The pastor was just was repetitive as Foggy’s mother had claimed, but he seemed like a nice enough guy, and the Christmas Choir, while perhaps not the musical event of the year, were really very good, and did beautiful versions of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “O Holy Night,” and “Joy to the World.” It was also kind of nice to go as part of the Nelsons' extended clan; even as a kid, it had just been him and his dad, and so going to church even as the guest of a large family was an unfamiliar but pleasant experience. Foggy, who sat next to him, nudged him when it was time to sit down or stand up during the service, and whispered to him what was coming up next in the program, and Daphne, on the other side, cued him when the offering plate was passed around. He could hear people wondering who he was, but they also wondered about Sahar and Christie and Kelly and Al, too, and not with anxiety or aggression, but only because the Nelsons brought a crowd every year, and wondering who’d they’d brought seemed to be a Christmas tradition for some. 

Afterward, Foggy took him to a midnight mass at, strangely enough, the church he’d gone to as a child, which was near the Nelsons’ church. Christmas at St. Agnes had ended up being more of a religious than a fun holiday—Santa brought only cheap donated toys to hard-to-adopt disabled kids, and having to be grateful for them stuck in Matt’s craw—but sitting there with Foggy, Matt felt some of the joy and wonder Christmas had held for him as a little kid. Jack Murdock had never had a lot of money, but he’d always done his best by Matt during the holidays. It was good to think about those days now and here, whispering explanations to Foggy during the service as Foggy had earlier in the evening.

Christmas morning was wild—everybody had at least a present or two, but nobody even tried to buy a present for everyone, with the possible exception of Foggy’s parents, so Matt felt better about only having things for Mr. and Mrs. Nelson and Foggy. Mr. and Mrs. Nelson seemed to like the wine, and Foggy exclaimed with pleasure when he opened the hat and scarf Matt had found for him, and put them on immediately.

To Matt’s surprise, he got a couple of presents, too. Foggy got him a couple of books on tape he had been meaning to read; Uncle Edgar, who was always looking for a new audience, got Matt a record of his own band playing a bunch of old jazz standards; and Foggy’s parents had gotten him one of those inexpensive polyester fleece blankets they sold in department stores.

“Foggy said that you liked soft things,” Mr. Nelson explained. “These were about the softest things we could find. Unless you wanted a cat.”

Matt ran his hand over the blanket. It _was_ soft. If he didn’t pay attention, all the fibers blurred together under his fingertips, making it feel wonderfully smooth. “No,” he said. “This is great, you didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Sure we did,” said Mrs. Nelson. “Playing Santa Claus is the best part of hosting during Christmas.”

Foggy’s family usually went to see a movie on Christmas after they’d opened gifts. Though they’d generally been great about Matt being blind, his admission that he really didn’t like going to the movies left an awkward silence in the room, most awkward of all from Foggy.

“Sorry, bud,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t even think of that. I can stay here with you, no biggie.”

“We could stay and watch movies here,” Foggy’s mom offered, though she’d clearly been excited about a trip to the movies with her family. Matt got the impression she didn’t get all four of her children together all that often.

Matt shook his head. “No, you guys go and have fun. After all the excitement last night, I could probably use a nap, anyway.”

“Matt, you party animal, you,” said Foggy, throwing an arm around Matt’s shoulders. In a lower voice, he added, “Are you sure? I could stay here and we could watch A Muppet Christmas Carol or something.”

“I’m sure,” said Matt with a smile. “We can watch the Muppets later; go out with your family.”

“I’m staying, too,” Tamara said suddenly. “It’s Christmas, I don’t feel like showering and putting on real clothes.”

Uncle Edgar said, “Come anyway, nobody cares if you shower or not.” Matt privately thought that this made a lot of sense coming from Uncle Edgar, since he didn’t seem to be all that big on showering himself, judging by his smell.

“Nah,” said Tamara. “You guys go, have fun. I’m gonna clean up some of this disaster area.” The area around the Christmas tree was covered in crumpled wrapping paper; Matt was keeping his distance so as not to slip. 

“Well, that would be an amazing Christmas present, Tamara, thanks,” said Mrs. Nelson cheerily.

It took a little more convincing, but finally, the Nelsons and company were off to go watch...some action movie Matt had never even heard of. Matt sighed in relief without really meaning to. The Nelsons were great, but it was nice to have a little space and quiet again.

“Jesus H.,” said Tamara. “Listen to that.”

Matt cocked his head, listening to the refrigerator run, the electricity humming in the lights on the Nelsons’ tree, the rumble of their heater. “To what?”

“The _quiet_.”

Matt laughed, and after a moment Tamara joined him in laughter. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I love my family, but boy, I do _not_ regret not living here full-time.”

“I think it would get pretty crowded,” Matt agreed. 

Tamara got up from the loveseat and went to sit next to Matt on the couch. “What’s it like living with Foggy?” she asked. “I always imagined that would involve a lot of loud music and smoking weed with skaters in the park, but that might just be my impressions of him from when we were kids. We really haven’t seen each other that much since I graduated high school.”

“So far, no weed or skaters, though there is the occasional loud music.” Matt decided not to mention that the music came from Foggy’s headphones when he was listening to his iPod; Foggy was trying to be considerate, it wasn’t his fault Matt could hear his pounding metal music from across the room. 

They talked for a while about Matt and Foggy’s living situation, and then about Tamara’s and then, randomly, about politics, getting into a genuine raised-voice argument over the role the government should play in monitoring and governing groups like SHIELD and the Avengers. About twenty minutes into the argument, Matt made what he felt was a particularly good point about the World Security Council’s intransigence when it came to making transparent decisions, and he realized that Tamara wasn’t actually _angry_ at anything he was saying, even if she disagreed. No, she was _turned on._

That was...huh. Matt honestly hadn’t even been thinking about sex during his time at the Nelsons’, being generally too busy trying to get the lay of the land and respond appropriately to what people said to him. Maybe he was misreading the situation here; God knew Matt was a bit overstimulated at the moment. He himself might have been giving off signals of arousal, given how involved he’d gotten in the conversation. 

“Matt?”

He’d been quiet too long. “Mm, sorry, what were you saying?”

“I was saying that, when it comes to matters of international security, it makes total sense to me that the WSC wouldn’t give much information about their members or decisions.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Where’d you go just then? You seemed to be a million miles away.”

Matt put a smile on his face. “Just thinking.” And then, just to see if his original theory had been correct, he put a hand on her arm, the one that wasn’t touching his shoulder. Under her sweater, her temperature was a little elevated; her pulse jumped at the context.

Tamara made a considering noise. “Smooth operator, huh?” she asked, her voice sounding a little strangled.

“I don’t think so,” said Matt with a shrug. “Just, uh. Open to possibilities.” She was silent for a moment, during which Matt wondered if he was making a catastrophic error. Tamara was smart, and smelled nice, and had a good sense of humor, but the last thing on earth he wanted to do was to make Tamara or anyone else uncomfortable, not when the Nelsons had been so good to him. “Sorry if I’m making this really awkward,” he said. “Sometimes I misread things.”

“Ah, what the hell,” said Tamara, more to herself than to Matt. “It’s Christmas, I’m single. I deserve nice things.”

Matt nodded. “Of course you do.”

It was very possible that Matt didn’t give Foggy enough credit for being observant, because only a few hours after the rest of the Nelsons returned from the movie, when the whole group was clustered in the living room watching a James Bond marathon on TV, Foggy said, “Hey, Matt, can I talk to you for a minute?”

There was something funny about his voice, and Matt managed to extract himself from the over-soft couch, where he’d been sitting next to Tamara. “Sure, Fog,” he said. 

They went outside, where the air was cold but crisp and clear and dry, and Foggy said, “Am I nuts, or did you hook up with my cousin while we were at the movies?”

Matt frowned, trying to interpret Foggy’s tone. This might be a question whose answer had serious repercussions. “Why do you ask?” he said, trying to buy time and information.

“Uh, I don’t know, because you’re cuddling on the couch playing footsie with her.” Matt wasn’t sure if this required a response, so he stayed quiet. After a moment, Foggy groaned. “Oh my God, you did. Can you _seriously_ not keep it in your pants until we get back to the dorm?”

“Tamara and I are both adults,” Matt pointed out. “It’s not really any of your business what we get up to.”

“ _So_ not the point, dude. Oh my _God_ , you better not break her heart or anything, my Uncle Edgar can be genuinely scary if people piss him off.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Believe me, Foggy, no hearts are involved here. It was just—we were arguing about current events, we were both getting pretty into it, things went from there.”

“Things _always_ go from there with you, Matt!” Foggy settled himself on the doorstep of the Nelsons' building, resting his chin in his hands and letting out a gusty sigh. “I know you’re like the Casanova of Columbia, but it’s _Christmas_ , and we’re at my _parents’ house._ ”

“I’m sorry,” said Matt, cautiously sitting down next to Foggy on the doorstep. “Do you want me to leave? I can take the subway back by myself, it’s not a problem.” Matt thought he did a good job of sounding calm and in control, considering his heart was in his throat. He was a moron. Matt Murdock, always a champion when it came to ruining good things.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Some of the fight had left Foggy’s voice, and he nudged Matt in the side with his elbow. “Of course I don’t want you to leave. Just—try not to have an orgy with my sister and half the block before we leave, okay?”

“I’m pretty sure I can avoid that,” said Matt, his relief desperate and uncertain.

Things were a little weird between Foggy and him for the next day or two, but by the time they left the Nelsons’, Matt with a tin full of cookies Mrs. Nelson had made and Tamara’s e-mail address so they could talk when the Avengers next did something outrageous, things seemed more or less back to normal. They spent the end of the break marathoning the Harry Potter movies, as Foggy had promised, and Matt silently congratulated himself on making it through the holidays without driving Foggy away.

The first week of the spring semester, Elektra Natchios asked Matt out, and the rest of the semester was like a long downward slide into a place Matt hadn’t been in a long time.

Oh, Elektra.

When she broke up with him, it was like when he and Naomi had broken up turned up to ten. Matt fucked and studied and studied and fucked, trying his best not to feel anything at all. Foggy was a constant, worried presence, and Matt let Foggy force food into him or drag him to the park for fresh air because it made Foggy feel better, not because it made Matt feel better. Matt knew he was getting a reputation among their cohort for being some kind of sex maniac, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He was having a hard time caring about much of anything. 

He pulled himself out of it—or, to give credit where it was due, Foggy helped pull him out of it—in time for the end of the semester, and Matt cut his schedule of studying, sleeping, and sex to a schedule of studying, studying, and more studying. It was like a flip had been switched in him, and he stopped going out almost entirely. Foggy, who at first had said that Matt’s dick probably needed the rest, quickly got bored with hanging around their room all the time. For all that he wasn’t big on casual sex, Foggy was a lot more inherently social than Matt was; he thrived on being around people, and his schedule of working during the week and partying during the weekend worked so well for him that he seemed to keep it up no matter what point of the semester they were at. 

Matt was happy for him, but wished he could find somebody else to go drinking with, because Matt was busy trying to write his final term papers, even if it was a Saturday night. 

“Oh, come on, dude,” Foggy said, his voice wheedling. “The guy who hooked up with two girls _and_ a dude at that party two weeks ago is too busy to go out?”

Matt sighed, giving Foggy what he hoped was an irritated look. “Two weeks ago, most of what Professor Spaulding was saying in class was review from first-semester criminal law. _Now_ she’s discussing important precedent cases for determining what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and I’m almost done with my argument outline for the paper. I have to get this shit down so I’m familiar enough with the case law to ask Professor Spaulding _useful_ questions in class on Monday. Seriously, Foggy, I can’t go out tonight.”

“Wow,” said Foggy after a minute. “I’ve heard of ‘work hard, play hard,’ but you take the cake, buddy.” He clapped Matt on the shoulder. “All right, nerd, we’ll stay in.”

“I didn’t say _you_ had to stay in,” Matt added hurriedly, but Foggy barely let him get it out.

“Like I’d have any fun without you there. Plus, my paper idea right now could best be described as ‘nebulous.’ A night talking case law wouldn’t kill me. What are you on now?”

“Roper v. Simmons,” said Matt, a slowly-dawning happiness warming him from the inside out. A night of studying with Foggy wasn’t like work—it was more like a small party where Matt learned a lot. Talking things through with Foggy would be a hundred times more productive than studying by himself—he only hoped that it was even remotely helpful for Foggy.

“Death penalty?” asked Foggy. “I thought you were doing solitary confinement.”

Matt nodded. “On juveniles, yeah, so the reasoning in Roper’s gonna be useful.”

“You think? I only read it once, but isn’t most of it death-penalty specific? Comparing the U.S.’s policies with other countries?”

As they settled in to talk about psychological development among teenagers and sentencing disparities and the disproportionately high rates of solitary confinement use in New York compared with other states, Matt was grateful that he didn’t have to explain to Foggy just why he’d gone from “playing hard” to “working hard” so suddenly. He didn’t think he could explain it even to himself.


	4. My point of entry is the same way that I leave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt's well-honed system for managing his personal life encounters a couple of problems.

In the weeks and months after Matt and Foggy passed the New York bar exam and started the paperwork to open their own practice, it was a tossup which they got more of: congratulations, or worries about their sanity from people who knew that they had been offered the full-time positions at Landman & Zack. Marci thought that they had literally lost their minds—well, correction, she thought Foggy had lost his mind. She’d never, she told Matt, had much respect for Matt’s sanity. Matt might have taken offense, but given that Marci and Foggy’s relationship was crumbling under the stress of a decision Foggy might never have made if it weren’t for Matt, he didn’t feel he had much room to complain. 

But not everybody thought the decision was nuts. Some of their law professors from Columbia had thrown a party for the graduating law students who had passed the bar, and a number of Matt’s professors came up to him to tell him that they respected him for sticking to his guns. He hadn’t been shy about explaining his reasons for going into the legal profession, his desire to represent people who were often shortchanged by the system and couldn’t afford any defense but the overburdened public defenders, and apparently even the professors who thought he’d probably regret his decision in a couple of years and warned him about burnout thought it was a worthwhile goal. Across the room, Matt could hear Foggy receiving a similar mix of cynical warnings and proud congratulations. Marci’s heart rate was through the roof. If she made it through the party without breaking up with Foggy then and there, Matt thought, it would be a miracle. 

“Having a good time, Matt?”

Matt tilted his head toward the voice. Professor Spaulding. He hadn’t talked to her yet, though he’d heard her talking to Beth and Anita from his 1L study group.

“Sure, Professor,” he said. “Thanks for helping to throw this; it’s great.”

“We’re colleagues now,” Professor Spaulding said wryly. “I think you can probably call me Stephanie.”

“Stephanie,” Matt repeated with a smile. “Either way, thanks.”

Professor Spaulding—Stephanie—shrugged. She didn’t have a food plate, but she’d obviously been eating the little pastries with the smoked salmon; Matt could smell it on her breath, even under the white wine she was drinking. “You’ve all worked very hard,” she said. “I hear the folks at Landman and Zack were really impressed by you and Foggy.”

It was Matt’s turn to shrug. “I know some people are disappointed in us for not taking the positions there, but ultimately we decided it wouldn’t be a good fit.”

“I wasn’t surprised.” She took another sip of her wine. “A lot of people go into law as a profession; not so many go into it as a calling, and I’m pretty sure you and Foggy are in the latter category. Keep your heads on straight, and you might do a lot of good.”

“Here’s hoping,” said Matt. He was honestly flattered, despite his veneer of casualness. Professor Spaulding—shit, Stephanie, that was going to take some getting used to—was one of Matt’s favorite professors, and she’d been hugely helpful both in helping Matt edit his term paper for her class into a publishable article and in getting him an internship the summer after his first year. She was smart, forthright, and not awkward at all about making accommodations for Matt’s blindness. It meant a lot that she thought he might do good in the world.

“Now, rumor has it that Marci Stahl and Tariq Khan are going to work at Landman and Zack, since you two turned the jobs down. Any truth to that?”

They talked about Marci and Tariq, who were definitely taking the jobs at L & Z, for a while, and then about Matt and Foggy’s adventures getting their own firm set up, and then about Tony Stark’s project of rebuilding—or rather, having shady subcontractors rebuild—Hell’s Kitchen. The party was ending around them, but Matt and Stephanie were still deep in conversation. Matt was so glad he and Foggy had decided to come to the party.

“You want to continue this conversation elsewhere?” asked Stephanie. “Peter Toland’s giving me the evil eye; I’m pretty sure he wants to kick everyone out so he can clean up.”

“Where would you want to go?”

“There’s a bar around the corner that does great cocktails, or, if that’s too girly for you, I know they have some pretty excellent malt whiskey as well. My treat; God knows you’ll be paying off student loans for the rest of your life, working at a start-up firm for low-income clients.”

“My empty wallet thanks you,” said Matt with a laugh. “Let me just tell Foggy.”

“He’s over in the corner—just go forward and to your left.”

Matt thanked her and walked over to where Foggy was having a low, tense conversation with Marci, their heads close together. “Hey, Fog,” he said.

Foggy straightened up. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “You ready to head out?”

“I’m actually heading over to a bar with Stephanie—Professor Spaulding. You and Marci can come too, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

“Yeah, like I want to go on a double date with you and a professor, Casanova Murdock,” Marci said with a snort.

Before Matt could comment, Foggy said, “Jesus, Marce, she’s like twice his age, and a professor. Don’t be an asshole.” To Matt, he said, “I think Marci and I are gonna head back to our place. We’ve got stuff to talk about. Gimme a call if you need anything, okay?”

“Will do,” said Matt. “Bye, Foggy. Bye, Marci.”

“Bye, Matt,” said Marci. “Remember, no glove, no love.” Matt walked away to the sound of Foggy asking Marci just what the hell was the matter with her.

Maybe Marci had a point, though, thought Matt, two hours into drinks with Stephanie at the bar. Matt hadn’t talked with Stephanie that often since 1L, but he knew enough about physiological responses and flirting more generally to realize that she was attracted to him. It didn’t rise to the level of actual flirting, but it was still pretty clear to anyone who’d spent the kind of time picking other people up that Matt had. Maybe Matt should have been weirded out, but he was actually kind of intrigued. He’d had sex with people who were older than him before, but never with so big an age gap, and never with somebody he’d had a platonic or professional relationship with first. And Matt genuinely liked Stephanie, even if he’d never really thought of having sex with her before. 

“It’s getting late,” Stephanie said after a while. It was; Matt’s watch said almost ten. Not late for a night partying, but late enough that Matt would have had to give Foggy a call soon if they had still been living together.

“Yeah,” said Matt. “I should probably be getting home soon.”

“That’s one option,” Stephanie said.

“What’s the other?”

“Well, _one_ option is that you could come back to my place.” Her pulse was a little rapid, but her voice was steady. Matt imagined that she’d been around long enough not to get overly nervous about the prospect of sleeping with a younger guy.

“Are you, um.” Matt felt the need to clarify. “Are you, uh, inviting me up to see your etchings, as it were?”

“Matt.” Stephanie’s hand was light and thin-boned as she laid it on Matt’s, but somehow it felt like the center of gravity in the room. “We’re both adults. You’re not my student anymore, and unless your thing with Foggy fails so miserably it somehow ruins the rest of your CV, I don’t think you’re ever going to need to come to me for a letter of recommendation again. I don’t know if you’d be interested in an old woman like me, but—”

“You’re not old,” Matt said, cutting her off. “And I’ve always really liked you. I just wanted to be sure what you’re asking.”

“Suggesting, I guess. If you don’t want to, it’s not a problem—I can call you a cab, on me.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Matt turned his hand over so he could hold Stephanie’s. “Your place sounds good to me.”

Stephanie’s place was amazing, a two-story townhouse with bay windows and high ceilings. Matt guessed being a law professor at Columbia had its perks. There were vague hints of masculine odors hovering in places like the bathroom or the hall closet, but they were very old, just faint ghosts, and Matt guessed that it had been quite a while, at least six months, since her last boyfriend. All this space must have been lonely for just one person.

Her bed was a huge affair with a down comforter that Matt insisted they put on the floor before they got started. He wasn’t going to be responsible for ruining a comforter that felt as expensive as this one did. The room was warm enough in the early summer that it wasn’t necessary, anyway.

Sex with Stephanie was amazing, a totally new experience. She wanted penetrative sex, but needed a lot of preparation to get there—fingers, oral, plenty of lubrication. But the way she ran her hands over Matt’s body, almost reverently, the way she whispered things like, “My God, you’re beautiful,” and “It’s been so long since I felt this good” made him want to spend all the time in the world making her feel even better. He lavished attention on all the places that seemed especially sensitive—her neck, her breasts, the soft skin behind her ears, he gently opened her finger by finger, and when he was in her and she came with a soft flutter around him, Matt knew that every minute of it had been worth it.

In the morning, Matt sat around in yesterday’s clothes drinking coffee and eating toast while Stephanie read the paper in her robe. It was...awkward, in a way that morning afters usually weren’t. Stephanie was a professor, and clearly had a lot of money, and Matt couldn’t help but feel like he’d accidentally wandered into the teachers’ lounge.

“So,” he said after breakfast. “Thanks for everything. I guess I’ll catch a bus home.”

“Just like that?” asked Stephanie. “I’m going to the symphony next weekend. Is that the kind of thing that would hold any appeal for you?”

It was, actually. And so, with a symphony here and a restaurant dinner there, it seemed, strangely enough, like Matt was actually dating Stephanie. Well. Stranger things had happened.

Foggy, after he got over his stunned disbelief that Marci had actually been right about Stephanie being into Matt, was not what Matt would call best pleased. 

“She’s old enough to be your mother, dude, and she was our _teacher_.”

“Yeah, in law school, not preschool.” Matt felt the knot in his tie, frowned, and undid it to try again. He was generally pretty good with neck ties, but this one seemed unusually tricky. It was probably just that the material, not having any grosgrain ridges or texture to it, was more slippery than most of Matt’s ties. 

“And the _opera_ , seriously? What is she, your sugar daddy?” Foggy paused. “Sugar mommy? That sounds really weird, forget I said that.”

“Which part?” Foggy wasn’t an opera fan, but Matt was curious. It was the kind of thing he never would have imagined himself going to when he was a kid, and he’d be lying to himself if he said that the thought of going to the Met as the escort of a well-respected legal scholar didn’t appeal to him. It made him feel a funny kind of pride, somewhere in that part of himself that was still shocked whenever someone called him “Mr. Murdock.”

“The sugar mommy part. I stand by my other remarks.”

Matt sighed and turned around to face Foggy. “Come on. Did you ever think of Marci as your ‘sugar mommy’ when you guys went on that ski trip to her parents’ condo?”

Foggy made an irritated noise that meant he thought Matt had made a good point and he wasn’t pleased about it. “Not the same, man. Marci wasn’t paying my way or anything, I bought my own plane tickets, and it’s not like _she_ was paying to stay in that condo, either.”

“Yeah, well, Marci’s parents have millions of dollars in the bank and you’re a broke lawyer paying off student loans, so if Marci wanted you on that trip, it would only have been fair for her and her parents to bring more to the pot. And it’s the same with me and Stephanie.”

“Except that Marci was never in a position of power over me.” 

“ _Was_?” Matt frowned. He didn’t think Foggy was just talking about the ski trip. “Hey. That talk yesterday, did you guys....”

Foggy made an unhappy noise, the verbal equivalent of a sad shrug. “We’re, uh. I guess we’re still technically together, but I think it’s safe to say we’re pretty much over. Our lease is up at the end of July; I guess we’ll see if we can make it until then and still be speaking to each other.”

“I’m sorry, Foggy.”

“It is what it is,” said Foggy, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself more than Matt. “I don’t even really get why she’s so pissed—my leaving Landman and Zack means they can offer her the job—but whatever, if she wants some ambitious one-percenter who summers in the Hamptons or whatever the fuck rich people do, I guess I’m not the right guy for her anyway.”

Matt took a step forward and reached out his hand, feeling around exaggeratedly until he found Foggy’s arm. He gripped it in what he hoped was a comforting way. “Sometimes people want different things out of life. It’s not anybody’s fault.”

Foggy patted Matt’s hand condescendingly and said, “Thanks, buddy, but I’m not sure I want relationship advice from a pick-up artist dating a sixty-year-old woman.”

 _Ouch_. “Okay, first of all, I am _not_ a pick-up artist. Pick-up artists are gross assholes who prey on women’s self-esteem and treat sex like a prize. And second, Stephanie’s a generous, intelligent, accomplished woman. I really think you’d like her if you got to know her. And third, I really wouldn’t say I’m giving advice. I just—I’m just trying to help.”

“I know, man, and I appreciate it,” said Foggy, but he withdrew his arm as he said it and neither his voice nor any change in pulse, posture, or chemical odor indicated that he was any happier.

Matt aimed his eyes to where he estimated Foggy’s had to be. “Foggy, there’s nothing wrong with you, you know? You’re awesome, and you’re gonna find somebody who appreciates you for exactly who you are.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Foggy flapped a dismissive hand at Matt. “Go on your date with Professor Cradlerobber, you’ll be late.” Matt was pleased to hear a genuinely lighter, less self-deprecating undertone to his voice, and cheerfully flipped him the bird.

“I’m twenty-nine, asshole, hardly cradle material. Do I look okay?”

“You look great, like always.” He sounded resigned but sincere, which Matt decided to take as a win. 

The opera was...interesting, as Matt told Foggy later. The singing was good, but it was all in German, and since it wasn’t exactly the right setting for a detailed description of what was happening on stage, Matt had a very difficult time following the plot. “I don’t know,” he said, “I think Stephanie was hoping I’d like it more than I actually did.”

“Dude, don’t feel bad about it. Lots of people don’t like the opera. In fact, the only person I know who actually likes it is my mom.” Foggy paused. “No, I take that back. Apparently Sahar likes the opera, too, Candace told me.” Sahar and Candace had been dating for the last six months and, according to Foggy, Candace wouldn’t shut up about it.

“Maybe Sahar can fill me in on the plot for this one, then,” said Matt. “It was Wagner, I know that much.” He didn’t like feeling ignorant. “We ran into some of Stephanie’s friends there, and I had to do a fair amount of bullshitting when they asked how I liked it.”

“Oh?” Foggy’s voice was overly casual. “What friends were these?”

Matt looked down, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “Well. One was a partner at Pierce and Fitzgerald, and one was a business professor. I think they liked the age difference thing even less than you do.”

“Let me tell you, pal, that would be pretty fucking difficult.” 

Matt didn’t want to fight. He didn’t. So he just said, “Gotcha,” and went over to Stephanie’s. Maybe he wasn’t great company at the opera, but in the bedroom, he knew exactly what he was doing.

He tried to stay away from the topic of his relationship with Stephanie around Foggy; getting their own law firm together was _important_ , a life-changing endeavor, and Matt knew enough about himself to know that if Foggy got judgmental about him and Stephanie, Matt would respond instinctively: either fight so viciously that their friendship might break under the strain of it, or bend, go along with what Foggy said and resent him afterward. Neither of these were acceptable options to Matt. 

It was hard, though. Dating Stephanie was fantastic in so many ways. She was frank about her respect for his intelligence and ambitions, and they could talk in detail about Matt and Foggy’s plans for the firm, which was a rare occurrence in Matt’s history of extremely short-term relationships. Sex with him clearly thrilled her, which did wonders for Matt’s self-esteem. And, though Matt would never have considered himself a kept man or let things progress to that stage, it was nice to be able to eat at expensive restaurants and not worry about the bill, or to have some help picking out some genuinely nice clothing that would serve him well as an attorney. It was the first time in his life he'd had anything so luxurious, food and clothes he could enjoy without having to ignore or block out a large part of his sensory input, and he was grateful to Stephanie for the opportunity to experience that kind of pleasure. 

That wasn’t to say, however, that there weren’t issues. One of the plus sides of Matt’s admittedly turbulent love life to date was that he had always felt like he was on equal ground with his partners. To go out with someone who clearly knew so much more than he did and _had_ so much more than he did, and who never hesitated to throw either her knowledge or her money around, made him feel unmoored. It also had the uncomfortable side effect of making him feel like a charity case again sometimes. And Stephanie clearly had the upper hand in other ways, as well; she chose where they went on dates (not that Matt would have taken her to Josie’s or the doughnut shop on the corner, anyway, but it still felt weird), she more or less set the schedule of when they met, and when they went out with friends, they were her friends, not Matt’s. 

But Matt couldn’t talk to Foggy about it. Foggy would just tell him to break up with her. So instead, Matt threw himself into their firm, and into helping Foggy through his breakup with Marci. Matt could handle his own problems; he always had.

He’d grown so used to sharing the ups and downs of his life with Foggy, though, that sometimes things slipped out without his meaning to. 

He was eating chips and salsa at Foggy’s apartment, fiddling with a yo-yo (because of course Foggy had a yo-yo) while Foggy played Pokémon on his DS, narrating every time he caught a Pokémon or fought another trainer. Matt had never gotten into the whole Pokémon thing as a kid, and thought the game sounded enormously unsatisfying, but whatever, Foggy seemed to like it.

“I think I’m going to get a haircut,” he announced.

“What for?” asked Foggy absently. “Your hair looks great.”

“I don’t know. Stephanie said something the other day....” It was hard to explain the particular way Stephanie had of making remarks that weren’t quite criticisms but nonetheless ended up giving Matt the impression that there was something he needed to do. It was kind of like dating Stick, if Stick had been a lot nicer, less violent, and a woman—frustrating, but it gave Matt a sense of self-improvement that he liked. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I think it’s a good idea.”

“Jesus,” Foggy murmured. “ _Stephanie_ says you should get your hair cut.”

His tone got under Matt’s skin. “Come on, I don’t even talk about her that much. You’re going to have to get over this thing you have against Stephanie, Foggy. She’s my girlfriend.”

“Correction: she’s not _your_ girlfriend, you’re _her_ boy toy, and for somebody as smart as you are, Matt, it blows my mind that you haven’t figured that out yet. Of course, that’s pretty much par for the course with you.”

Matt blinked. He and Foggy didn’t usually fight, and Foggy sniping at him like this seemed wildly out of character. “What do you mean, par for the course?”

Foggy paused his game, closed the DS, and set it on the table. “What I mean is, you seem to have a habit of either totally skipping the ‘relationship’ part of ‘sexual relationship,’ _or_ you get in these intense, crazy unhealthy relationships that completely fuck you up.”

“That’s not true,” said Matt, starting to get irritated. “And where do you get off judging me? You and Marci fucked like bunnies on every flat surface you could find, and the last time I was in a room with the two of you, your conversation devolved into a screaming match.”

“Yeah, _fine_ ,” Foggy bit out, “me and Marci had sex. You got me there, I had sex with my girlfriend. Lock me up and throw away the key. And that relationship may have ended badly, but at least we _knew_ each other. Weren’t you raised by nuns? I thought Catholics were against extramarital sex.”

Matt couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. “Foggy, you’re a United Methodist who goes to church once a year, _when_ you remember. You’re really going to tell me how to be a Catholic?”

“I’m not telling you what to do, I’m _worried about you_!” The last part was almost a bellow, and, though none of his arguments with Foggy had ever gotten physical, Matt instinctively braced himself for a fight. “This relationship with Stephanie _sucks_! She’s using you for sex, and if that weren’t bad enough, she makes you feel bad about yourself because you don’t have the kind of money that she does.”

“That’s—that’s—” Matt could feel himself flushing, and he seemed to have a hard time getting words out. “You are _way_ off base.”

“Am I? When she dumps you—which she will, let’s get real, and sooner rather than later—you’re gonna be _crushed_ , and then you’re gonna spend a couple of months fucking everything on legs, because that’s what you _do_. And then you know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna get mugged, or beaten up in some BDSM scene gone wrong, or you’re gonna get the clap, and Foggy Nelson’s gonna get to pick up the pieces _again_.”

“Fuck you,” said Matt, his voice trembling. There was more truth in what Foggy was saying than he would have liked to admit. “Nobody asked you to do that.”

“No, but I do it anyway, because unlike you, I actually give a shit about your well-being.” He worried his bottom lip with his teeth and then said, less angry, “I don’t know what your deal is, but I really think you should talk to somebody about it. Professionally, I mean.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Matt began, but Foggy didn’t let him finish.

“I’m serious. I am all for casual, strings-free sex, but what you do is _reckless_ , and stupid, and it makes you miserable half the time, and it is so unlike everything else I know about you that it confuses the hell out of me. I don’t want to pry, but I’ve been doing a little research on this stuff—hypersexuality, I mean, and how it’s sometimes a response to—well, I mean, Jesus, if you look at the rates of sexual abuse committed against disabled people—”

“Okay.” Matt felt a sick, cold anger raging inside him, clawing at his chest to be let out. But he couldn’t, not against Foggy, no matter _what_ bullshit he was saying. “I’m done with this conversation now.”

He went out, back to his apartment, and did pushups until his arms trembled underneath him. And then he did sit-ups until he couldn’t anymore. He paced his apartment until he got dizzy. And still, whatever was inside him wasn’t satisfied. Lying in bed was a wasted effort; no sleep would come to him tonight.

At about three in the morning, four local guys decided it was a great idea to kick the shit out of a middle-aged tourist in a back alley a few blocks over from Matt’s apartment. So Matt, who had never gone to sleep, got out of bed, put on some black clothes and the mask he’d ordered online, and kicked the shit out of them. 

It didn’t feel real. It was like a dream, like something else had been operating his body; not entirely unlike the way he felt when he had too much sex in too short a span of time. But it did make that poisonous anger recede, and when Stephanie called the next day, Matt felt like he could actually behave like a normal person around her.

His optimism took a hit when she opened the door. Normally, Stephanie pulled him into the house with a hand on his arm, drew him in with a kiss. Today, she simply greeted him and turned to walk into the dining room. They never went into the dining room. With a sense of foreboding, he followed her.

“Matt,” she said simply when they’d settled. “We need to end this.” She didn’t need to say what ‘this’ was.

Matt swallowed. “We do?” He immediately wanted to kick himself for sounding like a lost little kid. How embarrassing.

She tapped something on the table. It sounded like the edge of an envelope. “My husband was supposed to be away until December, but it looks like this deal is wrapping up a lot more efficiently than his company expected, so he’ll be back next week.”

“You’re married?” Matt still sounded like a kid, but he couldn’t help it. This was an unexpected blow. For all he hadn’t been terribly choosy when it came to his sexual partners, he’d tried never to sleep with somebody who was already in a committed relationship, much less _date_ somebody who was _married_. People were free to do with they wanted whether they were in a relationship or not, but Matt didn’t like the idea of being the guy people cheated on their partners with, and he always tried to avoid it.

“I am.” She sighed. “It’s hardly what you’d call the romance of the century. We haven’t slept together in years—hell, he spends half the time out of the country on trips—but I’d still like to avoid hurting his feelings.”

“But you can go ahead and hurt my feelings, I guess?”

Stephanie reached out to take his hand. “Matt. You knew from the beginning that this relationship had an expiration date. You’re twenty-nine years old. I’m sixty-one. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you’ll go on to date more people. A lot more people, if I hear correctly. I’ve been married for forty years, and we’ve built a life together. It hasn’t always been a happy one, but it’s what I’ve got. I’ve really enjoyed the time you and I have had together, but all good things come to an end. It is what it is.” She handed Matt the thing she’d been holding in her other hand. “This is for you,” she said. It was, in fact, an envelope. When Matt opened it, it held a small, rectangular piece of paper, maybe two or three inches by six inches. 

“What is this?” he asked, though he had a sickening feeling that he already knew.

“It’s a check for ten thousand dollars.”

Matt made a noise that, if he had heard it coming from someone else, he would have described as a cross between a bark of laughter and the sound of choking. “Are you—are you _paying_ me for sex?” This was unreal.

“Of course not,” said Stephanie tartly. “Think of it as a belated graduation gift, if you want, or a show of faith in your firm. The kind of work you and Foggy want to do, your budget is always going to be strained to breaking. It’s important work, making sure that impoverished people still have quality legal representation, but it’s never going to make you rich, and I’d hate to see you and Foggy crash before you even get off the ground.”

Though Matt wanted to tear the check in half, though he wanted to shout and throw it across the room, he closed his fingers around it gently. “Thanks, I guess,” he said, though not very graciously.

“You’re welcome.” There was a pause, and then she said, “I don’t think we’ll be seeing a whole lot of each other after this—no pun intended—but if we do, I would appreciate it if you could simply treat me as a former professor and a friend. Particularly if my husband is accompanying me.”

Matt swallowed the sudden, howling rage that burned in his chest. “I’m not a blackmailer,” he said, as calmly as he could.

“I know that, Matt. But you _are_ a very passionate person, and not a particularly good liar. I’d just as soon avoid any unpleasantness in the future.”

“Well.” Matt stood up. “If you want to avoid unpleasantness, I’d better leave, because I’m feeling really unpleasant right now.” As he faced her, his breath heaving, he thought that, despite her compliments, he’d never felt so small, so stupid, so unimportant, not since he’d started law school, anyway. He took off his glasses for a moment, massaging the bridge of his nose, and then he replaced them. “Thanks for the money and everything. Professor Spaulding,” he added after a moment.

She stood up as well, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold. “Likewise, Matt.”

Matt left her house and walked and walked and walked. He walked until night fell and the temperature dropped, but he hardly felt the cold. Somebody thought a blind guy walking at night made an appealing target and tried to pickpocket him, and Matt slammed the man face-first into a brick wall and kept walking. 

It wasn’t like he hadn’t known it was an unequal relationship. He’d always known that. He just hadn’t known that he was so small a blip on her radar, that she could end it with the snap of a finger and go back to her husband the next week like nothing had happened. That she could hand him a ten-thousand-dollar check like it was a one-dollar bill, like it didn’t even faze her as long as it made Matt go away.

He went back to his apartment and slept for twelve hours straight. When he got up, he dug the check out of his pants pockets from the previous day, got dressed, and went to go see Foggy.

Foggy was clearly surprised when he opened the door of his apartment. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey. Can I come in?”

“Of course.” Foggy stepped aside, and Matt walked in. He’d helped Foggy move into this place not so long ago, but he wasn’t used to it yet, and he had to take a moment to orient himself before he felt comfortable setting his cane against the wall. 

They stood awkwardly around while Matt tried to work out his opening gambit. As usual, Foggy made the first move. 

“Matt—”

Foggy’s voice sounded hoarse, like he’d maybe been—but Matt couldn’t let himself think about that now. Business. He had to keep the conversation focused on their law firm, or he’d fall apart. “We should set up a business checking account. For firm expenses.”

“Oh, uh, okay,” said Foggy, a little confused. After a moment, he added, “Those have a pretty high minimum balance, though, we’re gonna need something to put in it.”

“How about this?” Matt dug the check out of his pocket, a little crumpled up, and held it out to Foggy.

Foggy took it, unfolded it, and stared at it for a long time. “Matt? Where did you get ten grand?” He sounded alarmed, like he thought Matt had robbed a bank or something. Well. At least now Matt had confirmation that Stephanie had told the truth about how much the check was for.

“Your BFF Stephanie,” said Matt. His throat hurt. “A parting gift.”

“Oh.” Matt waited for him to offer some consolation, or an ‘I told you so.’ Instead, he sniffed loudly and said, “You sure you want to put this in a business account for the firm? This is real money here. Maybe you should keep it for yourself.”

“What the hell am I going to do with it?” Not go to the opera, that was for damn sure. “Besides, we’re partners, right? Nelson and Murdock.”

“Nelson and Murdock,” Foggy echoed, faintly but firmly. 

“Then I can’t think of a better place for the money to be.”

Having a business account did make everything seem more official, more real. They began scouting out office space, talking about what kind of advertising materials they wanted. They didn’t talk about Matt’s breakup with Stephanie, or Matt’s sex life in general. Foggy even began joking about it again. Matt, though, despite the temptation to lose himself a haze of casual sex with strangers, couldn’t get Foggy’s words from their fight out of his head. He decided to take things more slowly this time, to go about things smarter. He wasn’t a desperate student anymore; he was an adult, an intelligent, reasonably good-looking (or so he’d been told) attorney with his own practice. He didn’t have to just sleep with whoever would have him. He could take the time to find people who weren’t sketchy, to make sure that it was clear what both parties wanted up front. He could find people who were honest with him.

It wasn’t as if he had the time to go on a real bender, anyway. Something unnerving was happening in Hell’s Kitchen. Matt knew that the neighborhood had an organized crime presence—it had when he was a kid, and when his dad was a kid, and despite the efforts of gentrifiers to ‘clean things up’ and of the NYPD to be ‘tough on crime,’ you could never erase a place’s past completely. But the crime families of Matt’s day had operated in their own spheres, and those areas of influence had had limits. They sure as hell hadn’t been trafficking in kidnapped women over state lines.

Matt didn’t know what had changed, when something bigger and more sinister than the old crime families had moved in, but whatever had happened, somebody had to do something about it.

What, though, he wasn’t sure. 

He and Foggy started talking with realtors and visiting potential office spaces; now that they had the business account, which was earning a respectable (if still absurdly low) amount of interest, and had been approved for a loan, they had enough for a deposit. It was harder than they’d anticipated, though, to find a place they could afford, given that a lot of Foggy’s money was currently going toward the higher rent he had to pay now that he wasn’t sharing an apartment with Marci anymore. Matt would have invited Foggy to stay with him, but the flashing billboard outside the window gave Foggy headaches, and besides...well, Matt was going to try to _minimize_ the time he spent out fighting in the mask, but he felt certain that it was still going to happen, and he didn’t know how he could possibly hide that from Foggy if they were living together.

Essentially, then, they were limited to looking at fairly low-end places. Some of the real estate agents took this to mean that they weren’t serious renters, that they really weren’t worth the effort of talking to to find a workable deal. 

Matt was relieved to find out that Susan Harris of Midtown Property Solutions did _not_ fall into this category. Relieved, and pleased. She dealt with his and Foggy’s bickering with equanimity, she wasn’t discouraged by their dubious ability to pay for the office she’d shown them and said she had other possible locations she’d be willing to discuss, and she _curtsied_. As Foggy had said, adorable. Matt liked her.

Susan, as it turned out, had a couch in her office. It wasn’t what Matt would call comfortable, but it got the job done.

Afterward, when Susan was lying half on top of Matt, both of them covered with cooling sweat under the makeshift blanket provided by Matt’s jacket, she said, “I have to say, this was not at all what I was expecting when I made the appointment with your friend to show you guys that office space.”

“Me neither,” said Matt, wrapping his arm around her more closely. “If I’d known I got to meet such lovely people, I’d have gotten into this whole ‘looking for real estate’ thing much sooner.”

“Flatterer,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it, Matt could tell.

“I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Or don’t see ‘em, as it were.”

She laughed. “You know, your friend might have had a point about the price on the place,” she said, sounding contented. “Maybe I could talk to the rental office about giving you guys a bit of a break.”

Matt twitched. The sated tone of her voice had an almost Pavlovian effect on him, a conditioned relaxation borne of the knowledge that she’d enjoyed their time together, but the idea of getting a discount on the rent because they’d had sex...well, it didn’t sit right with him. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

She propped herself up on one elbow and traced patterns of aimless swirls and zig-zags on his chest. “It sounds like you’d be great for the neighborhood,” she said. “Local boys providing affordable legal services for the good people of Hell’s Kitchen? It’s practically community service. And we really want to rent that place.” She stroked a line with one finger up from his chest to the side of his neck. “Let me talk to Alice over at the rental office, okay? I think we can really help each other out.”

The proud side of Matt, the one that bristled at being treated like an idiot and hated pity, rebelled against the idea of taking favors from somebody he’d slept with. The side of Matt that wanted to help low-income clients and still keep his firm from failing, though, that side wondered if he even had a right to turn her down, for Foggy’s sake if not his own. He thought about his dad, who’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of to put food on the table for Matt. It was his pride and his principles that had gotten him killed. Matt bit his lip, hoped that his father , wherever he was in the afterlife, would understand, and said, “Okay, Susan. That would be great.”

After he and Susan talked exact numbers and parted ways, Matt went to Fogwell’s and beat the crap out of a punching bag for a while. It didn’t make him happier, but it did let some of the angry energy that had been building up leak out, and he was able to get to sleep after only a few hours of listening to the sirens and hating himself for letting them pass without going out to help. _Soon_ , he told himself. _Once we get Nelson and Murdock off the ground, we’ll be doing something about all this._

_Just hold on a little while longer._

He met Foggy for lunch and a rousing talk about the finances of their nascent firm. Foggy’s cousin Emily, Aunt Cheryl the butcher’s daughter, was an accountant, and she’d given Foggy a candid assessment on the state of their finances once the loan money from the bank came in.

“The number one expense is gonna be rent.” Foggy was matter-of-fact, but the financial situation was clearly worrying him a little. “None of the places we looked at yesterday is gonna be in our price range. We can head back to the classifieds to check out some other spaces, but I’m worried that if we go too low, we’re gonna end up losing any rent money we save doing repairs.”

Matt took a bite of his omelet. The eggs were those liquid ones restaurants often used for quick omelets, and they’d clearly been in the fridge too long. The eggs and onions and cheese sat heavy in his stomach. “The Midtown Property Solutions office,” he mumbled. “The one with the view of the Hudson.”

Foggy sighed. “The one where you were hitting on the real estate agent? Yeah, that one was pretty close, but still a little outside our budget, unless we can talk them down a little.”

The orange juice was too sour. Matt took a sip of water and cleared his throat. “Um. Yeah, don’t worry about the rent on that one, Fog. We’re good.”

Matt thought he could sense the weight of Foggy’s eyes on him; the silence seemed particularly heavy. “We’re good, huh?”

“Can we not talk about this?” Matt asked. He knew he was being overly snippy, that Foggy hadn’t done anything to deserve his anger, but some dark, unnamable emotion was pressing on his chest, and there was only so much he could do to hide it. 

“Sure thing, Matt,” said Foggy quietly. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” He pulled up his cousin’s e-mail on his phone and started talking about maybe getting his dad out to help them with painting and minor repairs. Matt ate his crappy omelet and listened.


	5. Because that limb which I have lost, it was the only thing holding me up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt never thought he had that much of his ego wrapped up in looking attractive, but when his scars from being Daredevil start to interfere with his love life, he starts to think he might have been wrong. (CN: This chapter contains sexual assault. Matt uses physical violence to prevent it from going further than unwanted biting and touching, but he still finds the experience traumatizing.)

Matt had a tendency to divide his life into befores and afters—before his accident and after, before his dad’s death and after, before Stick and after, before his first hookup with Josh and after. Before he had first given in to the devilish rage inside him and after. The before and after of being Daredevil, though, was proving to be more complicated than he could have guessed, even after all the soul-searching he’d done on the subject.

In some ways, he was more relaxed than he’d ever been. His nights were busier, obviously, but he was sleeping better than he had since he was a child, freed of the constant pressure of having to stop himself from interfering when he heard violent crimes being committed around him. Trying to kill Fisk had obviously been a mistake, on a number of levels, some that occasionally kept him up at nights. He realized now just what a huge mistake it had been. For the most part, though, Matt could feel good about the work he did as Daredevil. Exigent circumstances were a thing, and Good Samaritan laws, and with Matt’s senses and ability to fight, doing nothing was practically aiding and abetting in the commission of a criminal act. No, he wasn’t ashamed of what he was doing, and having an outlet for his anger made it easier to be patient in other areas of his life.

Which...was good, actually, since it seemed like Foggy was never actually going to forgive him.

Sure, they were talking again, even falling into the same patterns of banter and discussion they’d developed over the years. But the...the quality, or the feeling, or whatever you wanted to call that aspect of their friendship, well, it, too, was clearly divided into Before Daredevil and After Daredevil. Before Daredevil, Foggy touched Matt all the time—a hand on his elbow to help guide him, a pat on his shoulder for encouragement when they were encountering problems, a hug whenever the spirit moved Foggy, which was often. After Daredevil, it was Matt who had to seek Foggy out for contact, and then only under circumstances where he thought he could get away with it, namely, when they were in a situation where Foggy would have guided Matt Before Daredevil. And even then, the contact wasn’t like it had been before, easy and careless. Now, there were calculations to be made, balancing how irritated Foggy seemed to be with Matt at any given moment against how much of a pain in the ass it would be to navigate a particular street or crowded courtroom, and when Matt was holding onto Foggy’s arm, he knew from the tenseness of the muscles that both he and Foggy were thinking about it the whole time. 

Karen, who was overcompensating for her own secrets, whatever they were, went some way toward filling the moments in the office when Matt and Foggy had nothing to say to each other. But Matt still felt a desperate yearning inside, for affection, for happiness, for contact with another person that didn’t hurt, either physically or emotionally.

And so, after months of spending all his energy on the law or on Daredevil, Matt started looking for sex again.

This meant wandering out to unfamiliar bars again, surrounding himself with loud music and the smells of strangers. It was nice, in an odd way, like seeing an old friend after a long time. Matt was a little out of practice—there had been too many emotions involved with Claire to deliberately direct their interactions that way, and Claire herself had been clear in drawing her boundaries after a while. But that was okay. Matt could ease himself back into the game. He was fine just trying the bartenders’ specialties wherever he went, observing the kinds of people who frequented each bar, and, when the opportunity arose, flirting.

It was a Tuesday in February when the flirting paid off, and he found himself in the apartment building of a woman named Tina. Tina was a graphic designer for an advertising firm, more matter-of-fact than apologetic about the fact that Matt obviously had never seen any of her work. She’d married young, divorced a few years ago , and was still happily single, unwilling to entangle herself in more serious relationships after the hassle that her marriage had turned out to be. She smelled like honey and oatmeal and the bagels and lox that somebody brought to her office all the time, and she sang in her church’s choir. Matt wasn’t surprised when she told him that; he could hear it in her voice.

“Make yourself at home,” she told him, leaving him on the couch while she went to the kitchen to pour them drinks.

“You have a nice place,” he called from the living room. “Well, you have a nice couch, at least. Guess I’m not the best judge about the rest.” Though it was, for the record, a nice apartment. Clearly the ad business paid well.

Tina laughed. “Thanks,” she said. “That couch you’re sitting on is my first grown-up couch—you know, like I actually bought it at a furniture store instead of off Craigslist.”

“It was an excellent purchase.”

After verifying that red wine was okay, Tina came out from the kitchen with the drinks, and they sipped them slowly while they made out on the couch like teenagers. It was nice—relaxing, low-pressure. Tina’s building was quiet, relatively speaking, just people sitting around watching TV or sleeping, which made it easier to block out noises from beyond the building. Her couch was genuinely comfortable, and her soft, undemanding hands on Matt’s back or shoulder or face made the soreness of stress leak away under their warmth.

“This is a nice shirt,” Tina mumbled into the side of Matt’s face.

He laughed. “Thanks,” he said. “Picked it because it was soft.”

“Mmm. Well, it worked out for you.” She ran a hand up his ribcage, her touch light and sending pleasurable shivers up Matt’s spine. “Maybe, um. Maybe take it off, and we can get to...what counts as second base these days?”

“It’s been a long time since I watched baseball,” Matt murmured, helping Tina pull her sweater off before unbuttoning his own shirt and laying it over the arm of the couch. Behind him, Tina blinked, and suddenly everything about her ramped up—her heart rate, her breath, the smell of adrenaline in her sweat. A stress response. He turned back to her. “Tina, are you all right?”

“Am I all right? What about you, are you all right? What happened to you?”

Shit. Matt hadn’t even thought about that, that what was under his shirt would be visible once he took it off. He’d gotten in a fight with a gang of aggressive drug dealers two nights ago, and while the new armor gave a good amount of protection from blades and bullets, it didn’t stop him from getting bruised when he was slammed into a wall. “Oh, uh, I tripped taking out the garbage,” he said. It had worked with Foggy, after all.

“Taking out the garbage gave you all those scars?” asked Tina skeptically.

Oh. Oh, damn it. Of course, even the healed remnants of his pre-armor exploits would be visible. God knew they were noticeable enough when he washed himself in the shower, and they really weren’t the kind of thing that could be explained by a fall taking out the garbage. He could have said “accident when I was a kid,” which would, in a certain sense, have technically been true, but some of them probably looked too fresh for that. Urgh. He put on a sheepish smile and shrugged. “Bad BDSM scene,” he said.

She let out a shocked little puff of air. “Seriously?”

Matt nodded, feeling guilty about the dishonesty but unwilling to come up with an explanation for why a blind guy got into a lot of fights that would seem even remotely plausible to a sensible person. “Word to the wise,” he said, “Never let someone tie you up and hit you when you’re both drunk. It just doesn’t end well.”

“No, I would guess not.” Her voice was faint. Dammit, he’d been hoping to _not_ freak her out, trying to be a little lighthearted about the whole thing. He was an idiot.

“Hey,” he said, “we don’t have to do anything like that. We don’t have to do anything at all, if you don’t want to.”

Tina swallowed, not sounding all that calmed. “You’re really into that kind of stuff?” 

“I’m not into getting so seriously injured I need stitches, no,” said Matt wryly. God, he was such an idiot. The scars from getting more or less disemboweled obviously didn’t look the same as the kind of scars someone might get from a night even of the most careless and unsafe kink. “This is all pretty much healed up, though,” he added, trying to remedy the situation. “The risk of anything tearing again is really low at this point.”

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Tina.

 _Such_ an idiot.

So that was pretty much the end of that encounter. Matt put his shirt back on, they made a little awkward small talk, and then Matt left, feeling...well, he wasn’t sure how he’d put it. A little cold, maybe. He’d really been looking forward to spending some time with Tina—not even the sex so much, but the heavy petting, the touching, had felt like the perfect cure to Matt’s current state of twitchy melancholy.

Clearly, he needed a better way of handling the way his body looked now. He waited a couple of weeks, being as cautious as he could be with his Daredeviling and taking particular care of all his injuries, until he was sure that nothing but the older scars showed. He prepared a story carefully, using the car accident excuse Foggy had come up with for Karen, and then he tried again.

Sophie was an administrator in the city’s department of transportation who liked video games and cats. She kind of sounded like Cyndi Lauper when she talked, which Matt thought was cute, and she made great margaritas in her Magic Bullet. Matt’s car accident story didn’t turn her off the way his BDSM story had turned off Tina, but the overly sympathetic way she touched him after he got the story out made Matt call off the sex. He had never liked being treated like he was made of glass.

Two nights later, Matt went out to a gay bar. He’d historically had better luck having physically pleasurable but emotionally uninvolved sex with guys, and maybe that streak would hold true tonight.

“Hey, Matt,” said Trey, the bartender. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.”

Matt shrugged. “Running your own law firm turns out to be pretty time-consuming. Who’d have thunk it?”

“You at least making the big bucks?”

“Not so much.”

“Well, lucky for you, the booze here is still cheap. What’s your pleasure?”

Matt ordered a bourbon and ginger—light on the bourbon and heavy on the ginger, so as to keep a clear head—and listened to the other bar patrons. The Lucky Clover, Trey’s bar, wasn’t trendy, serving mostly middle- to low-income locals and a few hometown boys made good who came back for visits, so it was seldom crowded. It was doing pretty good business tonight, though; Matt ran into a few regulars he knew, which was nice. He exchanged hand jobs with a furnace repairman he knew named Victor, both of them unzipping their flies without taking off any clothing, and went home in a good mood but strangely unsatisfied. It was like he’d fulfilled his most urgent desires without figuring out a way to deal with the larger, deeper ones. 

Next he tried a trendier, more expensive bar where he was unlikely to run into anyone he knew. It only took about a half an hour and an overpriced microbrewery beer before he was heading to a car with a guy who worked in corporate real estate. He hadn’t actually mentioned his name, but Matt didn’t really care.

“You know how much this car cost?” asked Corporate Real Estate when they were in the back seat.

“No,” said Matt shortly, focusing on getting the guy’s shirt off. He was really looking forward to the part where Corporate Real Estate stopped talking and started making sex noises.

“Two hundred grand,” Corporate Real Estate said proudly. “Bought it with my Christmas bonus. I know you can’t see it, but it’s a beaut.”

Matt rolled his eyes before taking his sunglasses off and putting them in his pocket. “I’ll try not to mess it up, then,” he said as he unbuttoned his own shirt.

“Holy shit,” said the guy when he saw Matt’s scars, though he sounded more surprised than horrified. Good.

“Yeah,” Matt started to say, “Car accident—,” but before he could get further than that, the guy’s hands were on him, rubbing over the scars. Matt cocked his head, listening. Apparently, scars turned Corporate Real Estate on. Matt wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the jackpot or not.

“You _have_ been a bad boy, haven’t you?” asked the guy, putting his mouth to one of the scars.

The skin there was still sensitive, and the guy’s tongue felt _great_ , which was probably why Matt humored him instead of bursting out into laughter. “You could say that,” he said. 

“Oh, yeah,” said Corporate Real Estate, “you fags are just gluttons for punishment.”

“Hey,” Matt said sharply. He didn’t mind dirty talk, but he didn’t care for slurs. The guy wasn’t listening, though, still moving his way up Matt’s torso until he latched onto his neck and bit sharply. 

“Hey,” Matt repeated, pushing the guy’s head away. “What are you, Dracula? No teeth, okay?”

Corporate Real Estate laughed, shifting their weights so that he was pressing Matt down into the seat. His fingers were probably going to leave new bruises on Matt’s ribs. “What, you gonna tell me what to do? Sounds like you need someone to show you who’s boss. I’m gonna fuck you so hard you can’t walk tomorrow, see if you’re telling me what to do then.” 

Under other circumstances, in a scene that had been more carefully negotiated, Matt wouldn’t have minded someone saying that to him, but there was something in this guy’s voice—entitlement, maybe, self-satisfaction—that told Matt that this wasn’t dirty talk to him. He was serious about it. And probably a sexual predator. “Get off me,” he said, shoving. He wasn’t using all his strength, not yet, but he could feel the adrenaline course through him. If Corporate Real Estate wanted a fight, he was going to get one. 

“Oh, please,” said the guy. “You know you want this.” He leaned his weight on Matt again and reached his hand down to grab Matt’s ass.

Matt brought his leg up to knee the guy in the stomach and flipped them so that Matt was on top. “No, I don’t,” he growled.

“What the fuck, bitch, you don’t hit _me_ ,” said Corporate Real Estate, and he threw a sloppy punch at Matt. _That_ was a mistake.

Matt clocked him in the nose, breaking it. He could smell blood splattering the seats of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar car, and he grinned with vicious pleasure. “I’m gonna give you a free lesson here,” he said. “If you want to keep all your teeth, listen when people say no. I know a lot of people in this city who don’t look kindly on rapists.”

“Call the cops if you want, asshole.” The guy’s voice was muffled, the broken nose making his consonants sound weird. “See who they believe—you’re the one who attacked me.”

Matt really, really wanted to beat the shit out of him. But he’d actually introduced himself as “Matthew” to this guy, and there were only so many blind white guys named “Matthew” in the city of New York who had a reputation for casual hookups with both men and women. He had no mask to hide behind. Matt knew enough about the world to know that men, even or maybe especially disabled men, had a hard time pressing sexual assault charges, and the idea of explaining to local police, many of whom he knew, about how he had ended up in Corporate Real Estate’s car—well, it made his skin crawl. But Daredevil could watch where Matt Murdock couldn’t, could make sure that this guy paid the price if he assaulted anyone else. 

“You’re a prick,” he said finally. “And I dare you to tell the police a blind guy punched you after you grabbed his ass in the back of your car.” He spat on the floor, pulled his glasses and cane out of his pockets, and walked away in only his suit jacket, leaving his shirt in Corporate Real Estate’s car. He was still jumpy with adrenaline. If the guy tried to follow Matt, he was going to get a lot worse than a broken nose.

He didn’t.

Matt took rooftops and back alleys home, not wanting to explain to anyone why he was walking home without a shirt. By the time he got back, he was shivering, and he made himself a hot cup of coffee.

The caffeine was a bad idea. He couldn’t seem to sit still. He paced his apartment, sorted through his record collection, took a shower. He tried to sleep but couldn’t keep his eyes closed long enough. He couldn’t get himself under control enough to meditate, and the sounds of the city pressed on him.

Without letting himself think about it too much, he dug out his phone. “Call Foggy,” he said.

The phone rang five times, giving Matt time to second-guess his impulse. He didn’t have the right to bother Foggy about stuff like this, not anymore. But he didn’t have time to hang up before Foggy’s voice on the other end was saying, “Matt? What is it?” His voice sounded urgent. He probably thought Matt had been hurt as Daredevil, even if he wasn’t using the burner phone.

Matt swallowed. “Um. Don’t let the bedbugs bite?”

He had half expected Foggy to tell him to deal with his own shit, but he didn’t. “Shit,” he said. Matt could hear him moving around on the other end, casting aside sheets and covers, his bed creaking as he stood up. “What happened? Do you need me to come get you?”

“No,” Matt said. “I’m at my apartment.” There was a sudden lump in his throat and he cleared it. “Could you, um. Could you come over?”

“There in fifteen,” said Foggy. “Hang in there, buddy.” Then he hung up. Unsure what else to do, Matt made another pot of coffee.

True to his word, Foggy appeared at Matt’s door after fourteen and a half minutes. “Hey, are you okay?” were his first words as he stepped in, and Matt, whose adrenaline had long since drained away, felt like crying again. God, he loved Foggy.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Coffee?”

They went to Matt’s couch and sipped coffee together quietly for a while, the silence awkward and pregnant with feeling. The last time Foggy had been at Matt’s apartment, it had been when he found Matt dying on the floor, months ago. 

After a while, Matt couldn’t take it anymore. “Sorry for dragging you out here,” he said.

“Not a problem,” Foggy said. “You feel like telling me what happened?”

Actually, Matt wasn’t sure what he felt like. Looking back, he wondered if he was making too big a deal out of what had happened. It wasn’t as if the guy had posed any actual threat, not to someone with Matt’s training. Maybe he should have just come home and gone to bed and forgotten the whole thing.

Foggy sighed. “Okay, we’ll play twenty questions. Do you need medical attention?”

“No,” said Matt, starting to feel embarrassed.

“Did you...do something you didn’t mean to while out Daredeviling?” 

He wondered what Foggy meant by that. “No. Daredevil didn’t go out tonight.”

“Okay,” Foggy said patiently.

There wasn’t any point in keeping it a secret—Matt was just wasting Foggy’s time. “I was—I was out at a bar. I was gonna—I mean, I went with this guy back to his car. We were, uh. We were getting undressed, and he started—. Hmm. He started doing things I didn’t like. I told him to stop, and. Um.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Foggy.

“He didn’t stop, so I, um.”

“Did you kill him?” asked Foggy.

Matt blinked, hurt. Did Foggy really think that Matt went around killing people right and left? “No, of course not. I punched him in the nose and left.”

“That’s a shame,” said Foggy. “I was really hoping this story ended with him a smear on the pavement.” Before Matt could respond, Foggy shook his head. “Sorry, sorry, that’s probably not what you need to hear right now. Are you okay?”

Foggy had already asked that. Usually, repeated questions about whether he was all right really irritated Matt, but under the circumstances, he found himself relaxing a little. “I’m okay. He didn’t—I mean, he just bit me a little and grabbed my ass.”

“He _bit_ you? Let me see.”

Matt pulled down the collar of his tee-shirt, and Foggy winced audibly. “Shit, dude. You’re bleeding a little.”

“No, I’m not,” said Matt. There had been a little blood, earlier, but not much. Matt had disinfected it and it was already scabbing over.

“Semantics. The fucker drew blood.” Foggy leaned back and swallowed. “Matt, is it okay if I hug you right now?”

Matt felt tears pricking at his eyes again. Jesus, what was wrong with him tonight? “I really wish you would,” he said, managing to keep his voice steady. 

Foggy scooted over and enfolded Matt in his arms, at first hesitantly and then, when Matt leaned into it, more firmly. A patented Foggy Nelson hug, warm, comforting, guaranteed to make its recipient feel safe and loved. “I know you know this already,” Foggy murmured, “but nothing that happened with this asshole is your fault. You did everything right.”

Foggy couldn’t know that, Matt hadn’t given him all the details, but it felt good to hear anyway, and he nodded into Foggy’s shoulder.

“You want to press charges?”

“I can’t,” Matt mumbled. “I didn’t get his name. I’d probably recognize him if I heard him again, but.”

“Oh, Matty.” Matt prepared himself for a lecture on unsafe sexual practices, but instead, Foggy just held him. Matt reveled in it. Getting hugged by Foggy was a gift he hadn’t enjoyed in what felt like a very long time. 

“Strong arms you’ve got there,” he said after a while, trying to lighten the mood. “You still working out?”

“Yeah,” said Foggy casually. “The lawyer workout. Lifting my briefcase, carrying around my laptop, making big arm motions when I make arguments in court. It’s very rigorous.”

“It’s paying off,” said Matt. “I bet Marci digs it.” One thing Matt had to give Marci credit for, she was super attracted to Foggy and made no effort to hide it. Foggy deserved that, and Matt appreciated her good taste.

Foggy was silent for a long moment before pulling back slightly. “Matt, dude, Marci and I aren’t together anymore. We broke up a long time ago. You were there.”

Thrown, Matt sniffed Foggy, and then winced when he heard Foggy raise his eyebrows. “I thought you guys were getting back together,” he said. “You smell like her.”

“Yeah, ‘cause we ate lunch together today and you have a nose like a bloodhound.” Foggy drummed his fingers awkwardly on the couch. “I mean, we’re friends and all, but getting back together...given the givens, that just wasn’t in the cards.”

Matt was Foggy’s best friend. Or he had been, anyway. He was supposed to know stuff like that. Even if Foggy didn’t tell him, Matt had strong senses and knew Foggy well enough to interpret what he picked up. The distance between them had somehow become a gulf. Matt felt cold, despite the warmth of Foggy next to him on the couch.

“Hey,” Foggy broke in, obviously trying to change the subject, “You get any new records lately? I’ve been jonesing for some new tunes.”

Matt didn’t try to go out for sex for a while after that. He needed a new game plan for dealing with people who were _too_ into his scars, and the idea of letting people see him without his clothes made him feel...vulnerable.

It was okay, though. It was better, anyway. It would have been totally inaccurate to say that he and Foggy were back to where they were pre-Daredevil, but that night on Matt’s couch, drinking coffee and catching each other up on things like new restaurants tried and new albums listened to, seemed to give their post-Daredevil friendship a second wind. Foggy was touching Matt again, a hand on his back now and again, a fist bump when they had success in court. He didn’t get twitchy when Matt wanted to take his arm for a little extra guidance. They started talking again about things other than work. Their new ease around each other made Karen relax, and she started spending less time filling the office with nervous chatter and more time having actual conversations. It made Matt happy; it should have been enough to make him content.

It wasn’t. 

A month after the incident with Corporate Real Estate, Matt got back on the horse and picked up a woman named Amy in a bar. Amy ran her own start-up, a social media site for musical artists she was hoping could compete with sites like Bandcamp or Facebook for bands looking to sell and advertise their music. She liked talking about politics, and though she and Matt didn’t agree on everything, they had a discussion on foreign policy that was interesting without getting unpleasant. She kept her apartment very clean, which Matt could appreciate.

When clothes started to come off, Matt forestalled her questions by saying, “The scars are from a car accident when I was a kid. I know they look bad, but they don’t hurt, and they don’t restrict my range of motion. Are they going to be a problem?”

“Oh, uh, no,” said Amy. But her heart thudded the lie, and the smell of arousal was cut off at its source, left to grow stale in the air, and Matt felt himself getting depressed. He made his excuses to a relieved Amy and went home.

Matt didn’t think of himself as a vain man, but when he thought back on it, he really did like it when people found him good-looking. Even though he didn’t have much to do with it, his looks being more a combination of genetics, haircuts and clothes that other people helped him pick out, and personal taste in the eye of the beholder, it still felt like a victory whenever someone was attracted to him. It was like the ugly duckling he’d been, a weird blind orphan in hand-me-down clothes, had grown up to be a swan.

Except now he had apparently been demoted back down to ugly duck. 

“Hey, buddy,” said Foggy the next day. “You seemed bummed, what’s up?”

What was Matt supposed to say, _I feel disgusting, you know anyone who likes having sex with their clothes on?_ He smiled at Foggy and said, “Eh. Nothing. I’m just a little tired.”


	6. So will you come back to my corner? Spent too long alone tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt's dry spell is bumming him out. Foggy notices, and at long last, they talk through some of their issues.

Matt had gone the first seventeen years of his life without any sex other than a few furtive late-night jerk-off sessions; it wasn’t something he couldn’t do without. Plus, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to occupy his time, between getting Nelson and Murdock off the ground, dealing with the ambitious crooks who’d sprung up in Wilson Fisk’s absence, and slowly tending to his recovering relationship with Foggy. There really wasn’t any reason to get bent out of shape if easy sex had become a little less easy these days.

But he did. He felt twitchy and awkward all the time, like there was something under his skin that wanted to get out. It wasn’t anger—a few particularly vigorous nights of Daredeviling had made it clear that whatever Matt’s subconscious wanted, it wasn’t beating the crap out of muggers and rapists. But he couldn’t stand to sit around his apartment alone at night, either. More than once, he had to stop himself from calling Foggy at some ungodly hour of the morning, when sleep wouldn’t come and he was desperate to hear someone else’s voice. 

He thought he was doing a pretty good job covering it at work. And it wasn’t as if the work didn’t occupy his mind. They were dealing with a couple of wrongful murder convictions, and those cases were complicated; both clients had been convicted over ten years ago, and tracking down witnesses from the time of the original crimes and evidence that had long ago been relegated to a storeroom in a basement somewhere wasn’t easy. There was a nonzero chance in one of the cases that the police who worked the original investigation had planted evidence, and that was its own logistical and political tangle. Matt had always done well in his workaholic mode at covering up or casting aside whatever emotional bullshit he was feeling, so he thought this latest development in his personal life would be okay at least as far as Foggy and Karen were concerned.

Apparently not. 

Matt was going through witness statements from one of the old cases—not the one where the police had planted evidence, but one where Matt was pretty sure racism played the single biggest part in the original witness identifications—when Foggy knocked on his office door. “Hey,” he said, “you busy?”

“Nah,” said Matt, pausing the electronic voice that was reading the witness statements for him, “come on in.” Brushing Foggy off just made him suspicious and pissy, and besides, chances were that he had only come in to ask a question about one of the cases.

Foggy stepped in and closed the door behind him, his heartbeat rapid and anxious, and Matt sat up straighter. Maybe the question wasn’t about a case after all. “Are there any big criminal operations going on I should know about?” he said in a low voice. “Some major crime boss doing disgusting stuff that you’ve decided to take on single-handedly?”

“Um.” Matt considered pointing out that the way Foggy had worded that sentence made it unclear whether he thought Matt was taking on the crime boss or the disgusting stuff, but Foggy didn’t seem in the mood for a grammatical quibble. “No?”

“You don’t sound sure,” said Foggy.

“I mean, nothing Fisk-level. The usual stuff you get in a big city, violent drug dealers, spousal abusers, a lot of muggers and armed robbery. Why?” 

Foggy let out a gust of a sigh. “Well, you look like you haven’t slept in a week, and I’m starting to wonder if you’ve totally forgotten how smiling works.”

So much for Matt’s ability to cover up how lousy he felt. “I’m fine,” he said, putting on what he hoped was a convincing smile. 

Foggy’s heart sped up, and his voice was a little louder as he said, “You’re clearly not. My best guess was, you know....” He mouthed “Daredevil stuff” so exaggeratedly that Matt wasn’t sure it was less noticeable than if he’d said it out loud. “But if that’s not it, well, then, you’re just gonna have to tell me what the problem is. Seriously, dude. Just tell me what it is, maybe I can help.”

“There isn’t a problem,” Matt said. “Really, Foggy. I’m fine.”

“Come on,” said Foggy. His voice was light, but his posture was shifting, his footing becoming more solidly grounded and his muscles tensing. He was preparing for an argument. “I thought we were past this secrets bullshit now.”

Matt swallowed. Was there a way to explain this that didn’t make him sound completely pathetic? Probably not. Ugh. But Foggy clearly wasn’t going to accept a brush-off, and Matt didn’t know if he could take a return to the days of no physical contact. “Okay,” he said finally, aiming for a casual, airy tone. Maybe humor was his way out of this one. “You know that cliché about chicks digging scars?”

“Um, yeah.” Foggy sounded confused—which was miles better than angry or pitying, anyway. 

“Turns out, not so much. Or maybe there’s, like, a twelve-scar maximum. Anyway, I’m going through a dry spell right now, and....” Matt swallowed. He didn’t know how to finish this, and it was getting harder to keep up his cheerful facade. “I don’t know. I guess I’m a little lonely.”

“Are you _kidding_ me?” Foggy said, sounding incredulous. “You’ve been moping around like a kicked puppy because you’re not getting _laid_? Welcome to the average guy’s life, buddy.”

Matt had suspected that Foggy would think he was being stupid, but to have it confirmed hurt more than he had anticipated. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said shortly. He was done putting on a happy face. “Anyway. I ought to finish going over these witness statements and see if there are any inconsistencies.” He pulled the flash drive out of his work computer without ejecting it properly, shoved it in his pocket, grabbed his cane, and pushed past Foggy to step out of the office. He could hear Foggy’s voice saying, “Wait, Matt—” but whether he was about to keep making fun of Matt, apologize, or explain to him that sex wasn’t that big a deal, Matt didn’t think he could face him, so he kept walking.

The next day was a little awkward in the office. Foggy’s general demeanor was that of someone gingerly avoiding a feral dog, and Matt couldn’t decide whether his attitude here should be of one waiting for an apology or one trying to figure out how to apologize. Untangling who was in the right and who in the wrong when it came to this emotional stuff wasn’t exactly Matt’s forte, and he distracted himself by throwing himself into his work so hard that he barely noticed when Karen and Foggy headed out for lunch, and then when Karen headed out for the day.

“Hey, Matt,” she said, and Matt jumped—he really was distracted, he thought, chiding himself. “I’m going home.”

“Okay,” he said. “Be careful.” One of their current, non-convicted-of-murder clients was suing the NYPD for false arrest and police brutality, and frankly, between that and the case with the planted evidence, Matt was getting a little nervous about unscrupulous police officers targeting their firm. Brett was great, but even he couldn’t keep the entire NYPD in line. 

“Will do.” She stepped closer, closing the door of Matt’s office behind her, and asked, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

Matt took his earbuds out and grinned at her. “You just did.”

“Ha, ha.” Her eye-roll was practically audible. “Seriously, though, are you and Foggy fighting again?”

He felt his face forming into a frown. “Just a slight difference of opinion,” he said. He was giving Karen his “client” voice, the polite but not terribly friendly one he used when talking with strangers. He knew she hated it, but it was the best and fastest way he could think of to put on a good face when he was feeling overemotional about something. “We’re fine. Why?”

“I don’t know, the Cold War in here today?” Karen gave an exaggerated shiver. “Plus, you’ve seemed really down lately, and it reminds me a lot of when you two were fighting before, when we were going after Fisk.” She sighed and added, “I know it’s none of my business, but come on, you guys love each other. Would it kill you to work this out so we can have a pleasant working environment again?”

Great. If Matt hadn’t been sure whether to feel guilty before, he was sure now. “Sorry, Karen,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”

“That’s all I ask,” said Karen, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “All right, I’m off. Don’t work too late, okay?”

“All right,” said Matt. “I’ll bring coffee tomorrow, okay?” It had become his traditional 'sorry I’m such a fuck-up of a coworker' apology.

Karen laughed. “I should probably say no, given how much you’ve brought the coffee in the last month, but my taste buds won’t let me. You’re like the Coffee Whisperer. Surprise me, okay?”

“Will do,” he said, and he waved goodbye as she walked out of the office. He tracked her footsteps until they faded into the haze of noise in the distance—Karen could take care of herself, of course she could, but he liked to think that if she needed help, at least he’d be paying attention. When he could no longer distinguish Karen’s sounds from those around her, he reached for his earbuds, and then stopped. In his effort to focus on Karen, he hadn’t picked up on Foggy walking toward his office. His heartbeat was fast, nervous, and he was shuffling foot to foot outside Matt’s door.

Matt took a deep breath. “Come in.”

Foggy pushed the door open softly and stepped in, coming to a stop in front of Matt’s desk. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said Matt, feeling awkward. 

“Look, I just wanted to say—”

Foggy was going to apologize, which was stupid—Matt had just been overreacting. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s stupid to get worked up about not having sex. I was just being dramatic.”

“Hmm.” That was a frowny kind of ‘hmm,’ and Matt felt his own pulse hum with nerves as Foggy sat down in the chair Matt kept in the office for clients. “Well, I’m not gonna dispute you being dramatic, because, you know, you kind of are sometimes, but I, um. You were clearly pretty upset, and I just made fun of you. I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but I’m pretty sure I did, so, sorry for being a jerk.”

Matt shrugged, swallowing the complicated knot of feelings in his throat. “Like I said. It was stupid, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” said Foggy. “I guess if I were the kind of ladykiller you are and I couldn’t work my magic anymore, I’d be freaking out.”

“I’m not—that’s not—” His face was heating up, and he was tripping over his words. How did Foggy always do this, make an idiot out of him? “You don’t understand.”

Foggy tapped on the arm of the chair three times, _rat-tat-tat_. It seemed unbelievably loud to Matt in the relative quiet of the office at night. “You say that a lot, man,” he said. “Why don’t you explain it to me? Using actual words.”

“What, exactly, do you want me to explain?”

“Well.” Foggy sat up straighter, a joint popping in his back. Matt winced. “I guess, why it makes you so unhappy not to be having completely insane amounts of sex. I mean, I like sex as much as the next person, but I don’t need to be having it every night.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have sex every night, and I never have. I have too much going on.”

A rush of warmth hit Matt’s face as Foggy huffed out a frustrated breath. “Yeah, okay, my point is, you have way more sex with strangers than the average person, and you take it really personally whenever we talk about it. And now you’re not having it, and it’s bumming you out. Is it just a matter of having a really high sex drive, or what? Because if so, I’ve got a fantastic thing called ‘masturbating’ you might want to look into.”

Matt took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, feeling, as he often did these days, that he and Foggy were communicating on completely different wavelengths. “No. No, it’s not like that.”

“What’s it like then, Matt? Because you’ve never struck me as the kind of guy who has a ton of ego wrapped up in being attractive to people, but I’m having a hard time coming up with reasons for why people not wanting to have sex with you because of your scars—which sucks, by the way, don’t get me wrong—is hitting you like this.”

“It’s not—I mean, I guess it is ego, in a sense. But it’s not that I think I’m so great or anything. And I know how to masturbate, jackass. Me and sex, well, it’s not physical.”

“What isn’t, sex? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it is, actually.”

“God, _Foggy_ ,” said Matt, frustrated, “do you want me to explain this or not?”

Foggy paused, swallowed, and said. “Sorry, yeah, I do.”

“Okay.” Matt found a pen on his desk to fidget with, twisting the cap on and off while he thought of how to phrase what he wanted to say. “I, uh. I was kind of a lot of trouble, as a kid.”

“As a _kid_?”

Matt set the pen down. “Really? _Really_?”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Like I said,” said Matt, trying to let go of his irritation and recapture the line of thought he had been developing, “I was—I was kind of fucked up after my dad died. I couldn’t get a grip on my senses enough to go to school or do anything, really—hell, I could hardly keep food down. The nuns were at their wits’ end. And—and then Stick happened when I was ten, and that helped with the senses, but it brought this whole other set of problems.”

“Stick didn’t....” said Foggy suspiciously, and Matt shook his head vigorously.

“God no. Stick thought sex was basically like doing crystal meth. He talked about love like it was a disease. He never would have touched me like that. No, I just mean that when he was there, I had a lot of mysterious injuries to explain to the sisters and my teachers, and when he left, he stole all the money my dad left me, and there was this whole police investigation, and it was just a mess all around.”

“Jesus, I guess so.” Foggy’s voice was low, with an undercurrent of anger. Matt knew he was being roundabout, but he didn’t think the anger was aimed at him. Foggy had always been protective.

“It was fine,” Matt hastened to reassure him. “I got over it, I went back to school and pulled my grades up, it was just....” He picked up the pen again. He’d gotten it at a bar association conference—there were letters stamped into the plastic, and running his fingers over them was just distracting enough to let him continue. “I felt like the best I could achieve was minimizing the amount of trouble I was. There really wasn’t any chance of my actually making anyone happy.”

“That’s not....” Foggy started, but he didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. He couldn’t deny it, Matt thought grimly. He couldn’t deny that, historically speaking, Matt didn’t have a great track record making anybody happy.

“And then I had sex for the first time. I was seventeen, he was eighteen,” he said, before Foggy could ask and assume that it had been some horrible child molestation situation. “And it was...it was amazing. I could really, genuinely make somebody happy. And I knew I was making him happy—the things he said were clear, and his physical reactions were even clearer. I was actually good at it. And it just kept being like that. When I’m having sex, I can be a normal guy— _better_ than normal, because I _know_ when something isn’t working and I can change it. When I’m having sex, I’m not somebody to, to pity, or to fear.”

He could sense Foggy getting ready to interrupt him, but if Matt stopped talking now, he was never going to finish, so he hurried on. “My body can—can do things other than hurt people, or be a problem for me. It’s—it’s like a miracle, every time, when people relax around me and have fun and I can be close to them, even if it’s only for a little while. And now—I guess the scars just make people uncomfortable. Instead of making them happy, I just weird them out. It’s not their fault, they can’t help how they feel, and I know nobody owes me anything, it just....” He shrugged, the flood of words coming to an end. “I’m going to miss it.”

Foggy was quiet for a moment, except for the pounding of his heart. Matt guessed he was waiting to see if Matt was finished. Finally, he said, “I don’t even know where to start.”

Matt felt like he’d been jabbed in the chest with something sharp, and he turned his face toward his desk. “I told you you wouldn’t understand.”

“No. I mean, I think I do. Question, do you even get any physical pleasure out of sex?”

Of all the questions Foggy could have asked, that wasn’t one that had even been on Matt’s radar. “Of course I do.”

“Hey, no, no ‘of course’ about it. Because what you’re describing sounds like you’re having sex as some kind of public service to give other people a pick-me-up when you get lonely and feel bad about yourself. If you like sex, great. But you know you don’t have to do the nasty with people to make them happy, right? You’re not, like, a medieval courtier.”

Despite himself, Matt felt himself smiling. “I think you mean ‘courtesan.’ Unless I really misunderstood something in my European history classes.”

“Whatever,” said Foggy dismissively. “The point is, you make people happy all the time, and I’m not even counting your amateur heroics. Are you forgetting Mrs. Moskowicz bringing us a shitload of pies last week because we got her out of that hideous parking ticket payment plan? She called us ‘handsome young angels.’ She made the crusts from _scratch_. Does that sound like somebody who needs to be seduced into finding you awesome? No wait, don’t answer that, I don’t want to know.” 

Matt hadn’t even opened his mouth, but at that, he had to respond, “That was just me doing my job. Mrs. Moskowicz was being exploited, and we’re her lawyers—representing her interests is literally the bare minimum of what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“Yeah, okay, but award us _some_ points for doing it _well_ , dude.” Foggy sighed. “You don’t like that one? How about all the people we helped for free when we were interning at the legal aid clinic? Or Josie, when we helped her avoid losing her bar? Or Tom Belkin—did he or did he not call us MVPs for going above and beyond volunteering at the food drive last year? You think Clint Peterson’s not happy about us getting his kids into a decent day care?”

Matt couldn’t say much to that, except that it proved something that he’d actually suspected for a long time—that the part of him that was just Foggy’s friend was the best part of him, the part he never had to be ashamed of. Almost never. 

He hadn’t been paying attention, so Foggy’s hand, when it came down to grip his shoulder, felt like it came out of nowhere. “Not doing it for you, huh?” asked Foggy softly. “Let me run this one by you, then. You make me and Karen happy _a lot_ , by being our friend. In fact—I think I may have mentioned this once or twice, actually—you’re kind of the best friend I’ve ever had. And I’m not gonna lie, you drive me absolutely crazy, and piss me off, like, at least three times a day—and that was even _before_ the Daredevil thing—but since you make me happy, like, seventy-five times a day, you’re still coming out on top with me, and you always have, without any sex in the picture.”

“Foggy,” said Matt, too overwhelmed to say more than that. He took a deep breath, counted to seven, and then slowly let it out. Then he did it one more time, before saying, “Thank you. That means a lot to me. It really does. And you make me really happy too, happier than anyone. It just—”

“I’m not gonna fix your self-esteem problems with a Hallmark moment, I get it,” said Foggy. “Have you ever talked to somebody? Somebody professional, I mean?”

“My priest,” said Matt with a shrug, not feeling as defensive as he usually did when the conversation came around to this point. “Not about sex, of course. I had to talk to a counselor when I was a kid, but I don’t know how productive it was. I was never upset about what she thought I should be upset about, and way too upset about other things. I obviously wasn’t having sex then, though.”

“Okay, fair enough,” said Foggy. “And I’m not an expert, but from what I understand about Catholicism, talking about your sex addiction to your priest would be mega awkward.”

“It’s not an _addiction_ , Foggy,” Matt interrupted.

“Eh. Close enough.” Foggy grabbed a peppermint out of his pocket, unwrapped it with a sound Matt was pretty sure people could hear in New Jersey, and started crunching on it, releasing waves of powerful scent. Matt wrinkled his nose. “Oh, shit,” said Foggy around his mint. “You’re making the face again. Is my eating a peppermint seriously bothering you this much?”

“It’s fine,” said Matt, and Foggy shook his head.

“Living with me must have been a nightmare.” Before Matt could protest that it hadn’t been a nightmare at all—at least, after Matt got used to the snoring, it hadn’t been—Foggy said, “Sorry, dude. You gotta tell me this stuff. Anyway, that was a thinking peppermint. I’m totally done thinking now.” And then he _swallowed_ the semi-chewed chunks of peppermint whole. Matt shuddered.

“You’re gonna choke to death doing that.”

“I could point out the hypocrisy of _Daredevil_ giving me warnings about my reckless habits, but I’m taking the high horse tonight. I’ve got a couple of ideas for dealing with your sex thing. You ready for this?”

Matt sighed. “Sure. Why not.”

“Okay. Idea one—you go to a therapist. I could help you find one on Yelp or something, it wouldn’t be any trouble. But I’ve been suggesting that for years and you never take me up on it, so idea two—you go volunteer at the animal shelter with me. A, you’d be serving the community, which is like your reason for being, B, you’d be hanging out with me, so obviously awesome, and C, there is no way that even you could be miserable covered in a pile of kittens and puppies.”

“I didn’t know you volunteered at an animal shelter,” said Matt with a frown. It was the kind of thing he felt like he’d pick up on.

“I don’t,” said Foggy airily, “but I’ve always meant to. Anyway, idea three is sort of a variant of idea two, only instead of volunteering somewhere, you just hang out with me and Karen more and we have good, clean, family-friendly fun. And then when you’re ready, you get back out there, and I’m not talking about sexing up total strangers, I’m talking about actually getting to know somebody first, so when the clothes come off, they’re already familiar with whatever bullshit explanation you’ve come up with about your scars and they’ll be so in love with you that it won’t make a difference.”

“I think you’re wildly overestimating my ability to make someone fall in love with me,” Matt said dryly. 

“Bet I’m not,” Foggy muttered. Matt tilted his head, confused. Foggy cleared his throat and said, “Come on, dude, that’s your childhood abandonment issues talking. You know perfectly well you can charm the pants off people when you try.”

Matt appreciated the sentiment, but honestly, he was still confused. Foggy’s heart was beating in a way that indicated nerves, but none of the other usual signs of lying—breathing changes, rapid head movement, modulations of his voice, shuffling feet—suggested that he didn’t mean what he was saying. More likely, he was getting emotional. Was he...angry? Did he think Matt manipulated the people he slept with—was that what he meant by ‘charm’? “Foggy?”

“What?” Foggy’s voice was bright, but not with its usual, open brightness—this was brassy, fake. Matt felt something sour in his stomach. 

“Are you mad at me?”

“No!” The answer came instantly, and, Matt thought, honestly. “Why do you even think that?”

“I can hear flies crawling on the trash in the dumpster outside,” Matt pointed out. “I could hear what you said a second ago. And besides....” Matt formed a mental list of what he was picking up from Foggy, the better to present it in a coherent fashion: the rapid heartbeat, the raised body temperature, the tense stance. And then he had a sudden, sharp memory of sitting in a park with Stick, learning how to read people. 

_Is she sick?_

_Worse, she’s in love._

“Are you....” Matt started to ask, but it seemed too absurd, really. It was more likely that Foggy’d had a crush, back when they’d first met, and still felt embarrassed about it, or that Matt had ended up sleeping with a woman that Foggy was interested in. But that would be the kind of thing to be irritated about, not nervous about, wouldn’t it? Why did personal interactions have to be so damned complicated? Matt decided to play it off as a joke and say what he was thinking; if it turned out to be bullshit, then, at least it would be easier to pull this conversation back from some kind of emotional edge. “Are you confessing your undying love for me, Foggy?” he asked, in the tone he’d use to ask about Foggy’s plans to start a skiffle band or his fantasies about filling the office with bean-bag chairs. 

Despite his suspicions, Matt hadn’t seriously entertained the possibility of an affirmative answer to this question. He’d anticipated a swift denial, a joking admonition to get over himself. Instead what he got was a gasp and a stutter in Foggy’s heartbeat.

“Wait,” Matt said slowly, processing what this meant. “What?”

Foggy stood up, looming over Matt’s desk. “Oh, _Jesus_ , dude, are we really talking about this now?” His voice was exasperated, like he thought Matt was being slow on purpose to annoy him. _Now_ he was annoyed.

“I think we kind of have to,” said Matt, beginning to feel a little irritated himself. “Aren’t you the one who said yesterday that we were past this secrets bullshit? Pretty sure that’s a direct quote, by the way.”

Foggy huffed in irritation. “How is this even a secret? I’m pretty sure everyone who’s met us in the last five years knows, and that’s _without_ your ninja superpower senses.”

“Ninja superpower— _what_ —I’m not a _mind reader_ , Foggy, you’re telling me this whole time, you, you—” _Loved me_ , Matt couldn’t say, now that it was serious and not a wild, half-joking guess.

“Wait, are you telling me you seriously didn’t know?” Foggy sat down again, sagging like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Seriously? You can tell when people are lying but you can’t tell when someone’s in love with you?”

“I can make an educated _guess_ when people are lying,” said Matt. “It’s not like there’s a one-to-one correlation between bodily responses and emotions, Foggy. And love’s, I mean, it can be a big, complicated thing.” A thought occurred to him and he frowned. “Wait—all the people I’ve hooked up with over the years, and you never....”

“No,” said Foggy firmly, though Matt hadn’t even been sure how he was going to finish the sentence. “I’m not interested in a pity fuck any more than you are.”

Matt swallowed. Had Foggy been jealous, knowing about all the sex Matt had been having? Had he been hurt? Jealousy might have been a big part of Foggy’s interventions and advice about sex, and Matt would never have been the wiser, if Foggy was covering it up with genuine worry. “Foggy,” he said, “That’s not...why would I ever pity you? You’re great. You’re the most important person in the world to me.”

Foggy sighed, and when he spoke again, the irritation in his voice was gone. “I know, bud,” he said. “But let’s get real, the last thing on earth you need is more confirmation that sex is the best way to make people like you, and the last thing on earth that _I_ need is to be another notch on your bedpost, which I mean in the nicest possible way. Plus,” he added in a more normal tone of voice, “if this partnership goes up in flames because we’re fucking, I think Karen will actually murder us.”

Matt had to chuckle at that. “Yeah, probably.” More seriously, he said, “Can we—can we put a pin in this conversation, or something? I mean, the last thing on earth that I want to do is to—to use you, or hurt your feelings. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” said Foggy, who was good enough not to remind Matt that regardless of his intentions, he’d apparently done just that all the time. “I know.”

“I just, I just don’t know if we can put that cat back in the bag, now that I know.”

“You can’t just ignore it?” Foggy muttered. “That’s what I thought you were doing anyway.” Matt’s face must have done something, because Foggy said, “Sorry, I get it, you didn’t know. I’m just, uh, I’m just having my worldview blown a little bit here.”

“Seriously,” said Matt. His voice was cracking now. “I didn’t know, and I really don’t like the idea of just ignoring how you feel. I _love_ you, Foggy, and I want you to be happy. I’m just—I’m so fucked up right now, man. I feel like I could spend the rest of my life giving you the best sex either of us has ever had, and you’d still be getting the raw end of the deal, because neither of us would ever know exactly what the connection was between how I felt about you and what we were doing in the bedroom.”

Foggy stood up again, this time moving around to Matt’s side of the desk. “Come here, Matt,” he said softly, his arms open, and Matt hugged him, breathing in the scent of Foggy’s cheap shampoo and letting his heartbeat slow. “Come on, man,” Foggy said into Matt’s hair. “You don’t have to have sex with me or date me or anything for us to do this, okay? I’ve got plenty of hugs to go around.”

“I know,” said Matt. He pulled back, readjusted his glasses, and said, “Okay, I made a decision.”

“Um, okay.” Foggy sounded surprised, kind of confused. “About what?”

“About your ideas. Maybe, um. Can I pick more than one?”

“Sure,” said Foggy, still taken aback.

“Maybe, uh. Ideas one and three. One was the one where I talk to a professional about the sex stuff, and three was the one where you and me and Karen hang out more.”

“Are you kidding me, Matt?” Foggy didn’t sound confused anymore, he sounded thrilled. “Yes, definitely, those are _great_ choices. I am _awesome_ at Googling, we will find you an amazeballs counselor to talk to, and I have so many ideas for stuff we can all do together, fun stuff. For instance, did you know that Karen hasn’t seen  The Room?”

“Ha ha ha, that’s quite a story, Mark,” said Matt, doing his best Tommy Wiseau impression, and he was rewarded with one of Foggy’s happiest laughs. 

“You can say that again.”

Matt took a deep breath and said, “I’m not gonna forget about the whole, um. The whole love thing, though. I couldn’t, not if I tried. Maybe if we hang out more, kind of— _rebuild_ things between us, we could...I don’t know, we could come back to this in six months or a year and see how we’re both feeling then. Maybe you’ll feel the same, maybe we’ll want to give dating a try, or hell, maybe by then you’ll have met somebody else who turns out to be the love of your life.”

“Very possible,” Foggy said. “I am actually a very attractive man, you know.”

“I do know,” said Matt with a smile.

Foggy’s hand gripped Matt’s shoulder. Matt felt every place where the threads in his shirt were pressed against his skin, and he cherished the sensation. “All right, Matty,” Foggy said. “This is probably the first time I’ve ever said this about an idea of yours, but that sounds like a pretty good plan.”

“Excuse you, I’ve had good ideas before,” Matt said, faux-indignant. “Whose idea was it to call this firm Nelson and Murdock?”

Foggy’s laugh echoed again, loud and cheerful, in Matt’s office. “I’ll give you that one,” he said. “Though we’re probably gonna have to start calling it ‘Nelson, Murdock, and Page’ before too long.”

“Fair enough,” said Matt. “As long as the Nelson and Murdock part stays together.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. The Nelson and Murdock part is definitely staying together.”

Matt had been telling the truth earlier; detecting a lie was more a matter of guesswork than it was some miraculous skill. That being said, he knew that Foggy was telling the truth. He felt it with every part of him. 

For the first time in a long time, Matt didn’t want anything at all. He didn’t want to be anywhere else but where he was. He had everything he needed.

**Author's Note:**

> This story brought to you by Frightened Rabbit: the story title and title for Chapter 3 come from their song “The Twist”; the titles for Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 come from “Keep Yourself Warm”; the title for Chapter 2 comes from “Fast Blood”; the title for Chapter 5 comes from “The Modern Leper”; and the title for Chapter 6 comes from “The Woodpile”. Those songs were more or less my soundtrack while writing.


End file.
